Rowan Mangan:
And I’m Rowan Mangan, and this is Bewildered, the podcast for people trying to figure it out, just like we are, aren’t we, Marty?

Martha Beck:
Every day, all day. It can get tiring.

Rowan Mangan:
I think we try too hard sometimes.

Martha Beck:
We should figure that out.

Rowan Mangan:
Let’s try less.

Martha Beck:
All right.

Rowan Mangan:
But then again, we have to do a podcast about it, so maybe we should do it more.

Martha Beck:
So maybe you should tell us and the listeners, what are you trying to figure out, for sure, for reals?

Rowan Mangan:
For reals? All right, so in my real life, outside of the scope of this slightly artificial environment of the podcast, this is what I’m trying to figure out. I got tattoos, and once I got tattoos, I wanted more. I don’t think I’m alone.

Martha Beck:
I’ve been noticing visiting people.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah.

Martha Beck:
It’s fun.

Rowan Mangan:
It’s fun, right? And it’s kind of like getting logos on you or something.

Martha Beck:
It’s art.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah, man. But my art is like words, man. And I want to put words on me next because pictures, I don’t know. I’m ready for the words to come on, but then it turns out you have to choose the right words.

Martha Beck:
I can imagine.

Rowan Mangan:
I know, right? So I want to put song lyrics on me, and I’ve got a short list of song lyrics that I want to get tattooed on my body. But here’s my dilemma. Here’s what I’m trying to figure out, is there are song lyrics that are undeniably cool.

Martha Beck:
Oh yeah.

Rowan Mangan:
And by cool, I mean thought-provoking and soul-enriching and yeah, that feels like true enough to kind of brand my life with. But they got to pass the earworm test because I’m thinking every day you just have to look at your watch. And then you’ve got, as soon as you look down at your watch to see what time it is, suddenly you’ve got “Staying alive, staying alive, ah, ah, ah, ah.”

Martha Beck:
That’s not so bad. It would remind you to stay alive.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah. But then it’s just in my head all the time and round and round, and then I look at my watch, then it’s back. I think it could be annoying, or “Now you’re just somebody that I used to know, somebody.”

Martha Beck:
Well, that would be terrible to see that on your wrist every time you looked, like your wrist wouldn’t even know you.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah, no. That’s a bad example. Except it is an earworm. So it’s an example of that.

Martha Beck:
I think you should get the lyric from MacArthur Park where it says that “We are pressed between love’s fevered pages, like a striped pair of pants.”

Rowan Mangan:
Do you think I should put the little accent on the E of striped to make sure that everyone knows?

Martha Beck:
You have to make the meter work. The other thing you could do is you could have yourself tattooed with a striped pair of pants over your whole lower body.

Rowan Mangan:
You know, Marty, I kind of love that. I really do. I kind of love it.

Martha Beck:
Yeah, you could just do [inaudible 00:03:42] over your whole body. You’d have to really pick out the outfit, but then you get it tattooed onto you, boom, you’re done. Just stay in a warm climate. Don’t worry, the whole world’s going that way.

Rowan Mangan:
How about Maria Bamford’s thing, like if you really love someone, you should get their face tattooed onto yours.

Martha Beck:
On top of your own face.

Rowan Mangan:
And then you should get their arm hair tattooed on your arms.

Martha Beck:
Okay, honey. Yeah, with us, that’s really complex. We’d have to have two faces tattooed onto our face.

Rowan Mangan:
One in profile and one straight on, I’d say. But I’m thinking, look, this is getting a bit granular.

Martha Beck:
It’s getting very Picasso-esque too.

Rowan Mangan:
It is. You know what? I’ll keep working on mine. What are you trying to figure out?

Martha Beck:
Okay, so here’s the thing. My physical therapist, whom I love for torturing me horribly once a week.

Rowan Mangan:
Mysterious.

Martha Beck:
Has given me this image in my mind of me. Instead of just like a creaky post-surgery person lifting weights and screaming that it was too hard, she has an image that she’s put into my head of me running fleet-footed through the forest.

Rowan Mangan:
Oh, like a dear.

Martha Beck:
Yeah, yeah. And I even got a special pair of fleet-footed shoes and everything.

Rowan Mangan:
Are they hoofed?

Martha Beck: T
hey’re not unlike hooves I have to say. But I have a sort of trauma memory of doing a seminar in Sedona, Arizona many years ago where with 12 middle-aged American women, actually, I think there was someone from Trinidad and Tobago. But we went out to be fleet-footed in nature. It was kind of deserty, but kind of scrubby. And the whole idea was that you can hear people coming. If you’re tuned into the landscape, you can hear that the landscape is disturbed where there are people. So when you sense the disturbance, you run and hide behind a cactus or whatever.

Rowan Mangan:
It’s amazing what people will pay you money for.

Martha Beck:
I know. Here’s the thing-

Rowan Mangan:
Now we are women who run with the cacti.

Martha Beck:
Yes. Either do something really, really normal and right down the center of the lane like Oprah. We’re all going to Australia, whatever, or everybody gets a car. Or do something completely bizarre, like we’re going to go into the desert and when we sense others coming, we’re going to hide. So this was all supposed to work really well.

Rowan Mangan:
[inaudible 00:06:00] your life work better.

Martha Beck:
Yes. They’d never know we’d been there. They would just walk through never knowing that we woodsy people were hiding behind the cacti. The problem was that we weren’t nearly sensitive enough to hear the disturbance in nature. So the first thing we knew is we’d see other hikers coming around a bend, and then it was like, oh my God, we had to disappear. So we’d see a couple of European hikers with their walking sticks in each hand, 1, 2, 1, 2. And we’d look at them and then everybody, these 12 women, would just scatter into the cacti and the tourists would be like, “What’s happening? What’s happening?” And they would run after us and we would try to hide and they’d be like, “Tell us what’s happening!”, with their walking sticks.

Rowan Mangan:
What are we hiding from? What’s coming to get us?

Martha Beck:
It was a debacle, and I don’t want that to happen again. So I’m going to have to be really fleet-footed, or I don’t know, wear a baklava. What is the hat that covers your face?

Rowan Mangan:
Balaclava.

Martha Beck:
Balaclava. Yeah.

Rowan Mangan:
Baklava is the tasty Middle-Eastern honey treat.

Martha Beck:
Mmmm. So if I’m running through the forest with balaclava on my head, I think I’ll got a replay of Sedona.

Rowan Mangan:
I really like the idea that what you did was when you heard someone coming and there’s a disturbance in nature, you all just froze like mimes.

Martha Beck:
Yeah. We weren’t supposed to. We were supposed slither like weasels. No one would know. But instead there was a full five seconds of us just going, oh, and then running everywhere. And one woman had this huge brightly flowered hat. You could not miss the sight of this thing bouncing through the desert.

Rowan Mangan:
What were you trying to teach them?

Martha Beck:
We were trying to teach them to be invisible in nature, to be such a part of nature that the civilized… I’ve been doing this a while, Rowie, and taking different approaches. Right now we’re doing a podcast about going back to nature and leaving culture. At that time we were trying to literally physically do it by running into the cacti, wearing flowery hats. Some things work better than others. I’m trying to figure it out. So cruel to me.

Rowan Mangan:
What on earth did you do before I came along?

Martha Beck:
You don’t want to know. You really don’t want to know.

Rowan Mangan:
I think I just found out.

We hope you’re enjoying Bewildered. If you’re in the USA and want to be notified when a new episode comes out, text the word “wild” to 570-873-0144. We’re also on Instagram. Our handle is bewildered podcast. You can follow us to get updates, hear funny snippets and outtakes, and chat with other fans of the show. Bewildered is produced by Scott Forster with support from the brilliant team at NBI. And remember, if you’re having fun, please rate and review and stay wild.

Martha Beck:
Enlighten the people as to today’s topic.

Rowan Mangan:
I’m just trying to cleanse my mind of the imagery.

Martha Beck:
If you see me dashing and hiding behind a plant in the house just now, you’ll know why.

Rowan Mangan:
I think of that thing in movies where you’re hiding behind a plant, because it’s like a pot plant, and you pick up the pot plant and you go [inaudible 00:09:44] and then you put it down again.

Martha Beck:
Very effective.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah. So like that. But with cactus, it’s confusing. It’s a confusing visual.

Martha Beck:
Ow.

Rowan Mangan:
Today, Marty, on this very serious podcast.

Martha Beck:
It is, oh yeah.

Rowan Mangan:
We will be discussing what you call in your system, your cosmology of cactus, you call square four. Now the paying attention kind of listener, that kind, they will remember that we’ve at various times done a show on each of the first three of four squares.

Martha Beck:
Oh, right.

Rowan Mangan:
And if you go to the show notes, you’ll find the episodes and links. So thank you, Julia. And today it’s time for us to come full square and we’re going to talk about square four. So Marty, talk to us about the squares. What are you on about with these squares? Why are they square?

Martha Beck:
Okay, so super fast. The only thing people ever need to hear about from a coach, a life coach, is how to deal with something that they haven’t dealt with before, or they’ve never figured out how to deal with. And there are four stages in doing that.

Rowan Mangan:
Is there four stages when a European tourist is chasing you through the desert?

Martha Beck:
Oh yeah. I could totally go through that. The initial panic, then the actual pursuit, then the capture, and then the bloody brawl. It’s terrible. And they have walking sticks, but that’s a specialized set of squares. Okay?

Rowan Mangan:
Okay, babe.

Martha Beck:
It’s a bonus for our listeners. Yeah. Okay. So something happens in your life. You get a shock, an opportunity, or just growth. You fall in love, you fall out of love, you get a job, you lose a job, whatever, something happens in your life and you go into a period of, first it’s like, oh, death and rebirth. I’ve got to let go of my old identity and allow for a new one. You don’t know what it is yet. We call that square one. It’s like a caterpillar going into a cocoon and dissolving, which is what they do in there.

Then we’ve got square two, which is where you start to get intimations of what your next identity will be. So that’s like the caterpillar. Once it’s dissolved, it has these little things in it called imago cells that get triggered when it’s fully dissolved and they rebuild those same cells into a butterfly.

Rowan Mangan:
They have an image of the butterfly inside the cell. It’s kind of amazing.

Martha Beck:
Precisely. And that’s square two. We call it dreaming and screaming. I do call it dreaming and screaming. But it’s dreaming and scheming because you get these ideas like Ro’s thinking about getting a tattoo. She’s also talked about changing her hair from the gracious badger, but I don’t want her to, that’s a whole different argument.

But when you start getting a new identity, you start seeing yourself in new ways. You start dressing differently. You might rearrange your furniture. A new you is coming to the surface, but you still don’t know exactly what it is. You dream it and then you get really detailed and you scheme it. It’s like you dream up your blueprint for a wonderful house, then you make the plans really concrete on paper.

Then you go into square three, which I call the hero’s saga, and that’s about making the dream come true in the physical world. And that’s like a butterfly sawing the top off his chrysalis and pulling himself out, and it’s very hard. Making your dreams come true in that first stage of reality is super difficult. So that’s square three. The hero’s saga. The road of trials.

Square four is when you’ve got your new identity, you sort of know who you are and it’s working. It’s like you’re a butterfly now. You hardly even remember being a caterpillar and you can fly and float and sip at flowers and mate and reproduce and all that stuff. And all of this is the way we teach. My whole life coaching system when people come into Wayfinder Life Coaching to be trained is learning how to handle each one of these squares.

Rowan Mangan:
And it’s like often I think when people are learning about the change cycle and the four squares, square four sort of just seems like the end. You did it. But it is actually a space that we inhabit in our lives within the changes we go through. Right?

Martha Beck:
Yeah. And the interesting thing to me is that square four, it’s like being a potter who just has to kick the wheel every now and again. It’s relaxed and casual, but it’s not inert. Right? It’s just that you’ve got processes at work and they are effective and it’s working.

Rowan Mangan:
So at work in our day job, which is part of it is doing the life coach training and administering all of that, we talk about different projects or different things we’re working on as being, oh, this is still in square three. And what we know about square three is that it’s always like harder than you think it’s going to be and so on. But then there are aspects where we’ll go, this is actually in square four now. We’ve run this system enough times in the real world that it feels more like kicking the wheel than having to make a whole sculpture from scratch.

Martha Beck:
And actually we’ve corrected it so many times.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah.

Martha Beck:
We’ve corrected so many errors that now it’s actually something we can relax into instead of continuing to tweak and build it, even though we’re still continuing to tweak some parts of it. But it’s maintenance. It’s maintenance, and we can get into that in any area of life. Right?

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah. Yeah. I feel like this is sometimes the hardest thing to explain to people is that we go through huge changes and tiny changes and they all sort of follow the same cycle, but they’re just on a different scale in our life. So it could be like-

Martha Beck:
Fractal.

Rowan Mangan:
Sorry?

Martha Beck:
Fractals. Google fractals. You’ll see the exact thing.

Rowan Mangan:
I swear to God, I thought you just said pterodactyls. I was like, I am not following your logic, but okay, let’s go there.

So you can be in the change cycle in terms of relationships, or how you set out the pattern of a typical day, or work career. But also I’m really in square three in terms of how I like to have my coffee now. I have to try, do I like steam? Do I want to try it with honey? Yeah. So it can be at any level, but it’s fractals in the same way you said or pterodactyls. It works the same, whether it’s tiny or big. Right?

Martha Beck:
And you kind of get it systematized. We just sent Lila off to her preschool and you about lost your mind getting the system right, because you really do the first two squares. You want something to happen and you imagine it fully, and then you have to go through the hard work of sewing labels into her clothing and getting her lunch. And now you’ve got a system. You know what happens every morning.

Rowan Mangan:
Right. Because to me, the thought of having to think of everything anew each day is so much more horrifying than having a really stressful week while everything is set up.

Martha Beck:
I mean, it’s great. We need to get to square four in everything. And when it’s running, it’s wonderful. Your car works. It used to be that cars broke down all the time, like all the time. Everybody had a little repair kit.

Rowan Mangan:
I remember that.

Martha Beck:
You remember that. I thought I would remember it and you wouldn’t.

Rowan Mangan:
No, no, I do, I do. My mom even just recently said to me about her car, which is the first new car she’s ever owned. She’s had it for about 15 years. She gets very offended when people at the dealership tell her that it’s older. And she goes, “You know, this car, it’s never broken down. Not once.” And I’m like, “Yeah, no, but that’s our expectation now, mom.”

Martha Beck:
Yes. And it’s interesting because we’re at a point in our civilization where we have these fantastically complex systems that we really expect to work well. When we go online, I want to see that my video of the combat wombat. Actually, I saw a wombat in a book and I thought, that’s a combat wombat. Sorry. But if you you Google combat wombat, you expect something to come back. And if it doesn’t, you’re like, “This is buggered.” We say that if you’re not an American.

Rowan Mangan:
You’re really good, sweetie. You don’t say, “This is a bugger.”

Martha Beck:
My point is we’re in a place in technology where we expect all these systems to run smoothly, and that’s great. But we’re at a time in history when that expectation can put us in really big trouble, and we will talk much more about that in a minute. Yes.

Rowan Mangan:
Yes. So square four in our culture, I think it’s fair to say that the culture sort of says, get where you’re going and stay there. Right?

Martha Beck:
Right.

Rowan Mangan:
Go there, stay there. You’re good.

Martha Beck:
Establish an identity, decide to be a caterpillar. Stay there. Get so comfortable that you can be complacent. And it used to be more like that. It’s like people really did, they’d get married and they’d say, this is what I’m going to do for the rest of my life, because life expectancy was like 30 years. So I’m going to get married and I’m going to hold on. I am now a married person, and that will never go away. I’m going to work it out and lock it in and never have to change it. Right?

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah, yeah. Get married and hold.

Martha Beck:
Yeah.

Rowan Mangan:
Or find a career and hold. You train as a plumber and that’s it.

Martha Beck:
Yep. Yep.

Rowan Mangan:
But I think what’s interesting about where we are now, I mean we’re going to talk about how much change we’re experiencing. But at the same time, I feel like we’re in this impossible situation where we grow with a preference to being at the destination. And I have a familiar rant on this podcast quite regularly about the kind of culture of convenience here in America. And some people might remember my quite famous cupholder diatribe back in the day.

Martha Beck:
Well, we determined that you have-

Rowan Mangan:
I still get emails about my cupholder diatribe.

Martha Beck:
… 19 cupholders to prop up your existence throughout the day.

Rowan Mangan:
There are 17. So we can get too comfortable. And that’s not nature. And because it’s me, I have Ani DiFranco lyrics for every occasion of our lives. And here is today’s about the culture of complacency. She has a song, a very good song called Splinter, look it up. And these are the lyrics, some of the lyrics, not the entire song, you have to go look it up for that. But she says, something about this landscape just doesn’t feel right. Hyper air-conditioned and lit up all night, like we just gotta see how comfortable, comfortable can get. We can’t even bring ourselves to sweat.

Martha Beck:
And I just love it. That could be your tattoo.

Rowan Mangan:
I’ve thought of that.

Martha Beck:
I can’t even bring myself to sweat.

Rowan Mangan:
I’m to get it in my armpit.

Martha Beck:
Genius and art.

Rowan Mangan:
Oh my God.

Martha Beck:
Art and science meet inspiration, boo-ya.

Rowan Mangan:
I can’t even bring myself to sweat in each arm pit. Oh my God, that’s so good. Anyway, I think that people more mature than you will understand the very deep point that was being made there about complacency and the way that, by wanting to always be comfortable, we’re separating ourselves out from things like the temperature.

Martha Beck:
Right.

Rowan Mangan:
The time of day.

Martha Beck:
And it’s understandable. It’s an interesting dilemma because it is very understandable that we want to be comfortable, we want to save energy, we want things to be efficient. But here’s the thing. I said a minute ago that things are changing so fast that it’s hard to be complacent about anything, like the weather, and be comfortable that it won’t be different in another 10, 5, 1 year. So that’s kind of getting dicey. And I also think that what Ani is pointing out is that our inner selves aren’t really satisfied by that level of complacency either.

Rowan Mangan:
Yes, that’s right.

Martha Beck:
So I was raised with the protest songs of, was it in the sixties, the ticky-tacky song? Little boxes on the hillside, and they’re all made out of ticky-tacky?

Rowan Mangan:
I don’t think so.

Martha Beck:
Talking about the American suburbs in the period after World War II, the fifties and sixties. And I don’t know who’s sang it, and I don’t know all the lyrics, but I do remember that it’s about people being all made out of ticky-tacky, and they all look just the same. And the houses look just the same. And there’s a doctor and a lawyer and a business executive, and they’re all made out of ticky-tacky, and they all look just the same.

Rowan Mangan:
Anyone who saw the naughty’s era show Weeds would recognize it as the theme song for that show.

Martha Beck:
So that was a naughty era, was it?

Rowan Mangan:
It was the naughty era.

Martha Beck:
Well, it points out that when everything gets that routinized and that systematized and everything’s working right and everyone has the same yard and the same dog and the same car and the same job, it’s freaking boring. It’s horrible. It’s soul-crushing.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah. Because it is a separation from some essential feeling of being alive. It’s like convenience taken to a certain extreme is going to choke experience.

Martha Beck:
Yeah. I’m starting to see what my physical therapist is talking to me about because she wants me to go out and run through the woods precisely so I won’t be on a track that’s predictable. And she’s really good. So I think the discipline has gotten to this. Our bodies are made to confront unexpected situations and positions and velocities all the time. And when I used to go to the gym and do the same machines, I had strength in certain muscles.

But she never has me do the same thing twice. And part of it is getting strong in my muscles and part of it is getting strong in my nervous system, including my brain, because there’s a lot of evidence that shows that confronting challenges and predicaments and unfamiliar situations actually keeps the brain healthier and keeps mental health in place. So ironically, if you lock in and hold everything, your mind goes awry. And when things go awry, your mind rises to the challenge and becomes healthier.

Rowan Mangan:
So how does that idea interact with your idea of square four?

Martha Beck:
Well, okay. When I first started the whole life coaching system, I really thought get to square four and hold was the way to do it. That was 20 some years ago. And even though I had studied social change and I knew it was accelerating, I really thought who wants to be struggling with those first three squares all the time? So I myself was like, I grew up in a very sort of chaotic house where I felt like we were really abnormal. We did not have the ticky-tacky. We had more of a mold situation, mold and chaos.

Rowan Mangan:
And driftwood.

Martha Beck:
Driftwood, yeah. Like things in the corner that could speak to us but they didn’t have human features. It was not your typical suburban house.

So I grew up really trying to get normal and I personally anchored into the cultural norms when I was in my early twenties. I was already becoming a professor. I already had a husband and kids. That’s what you need. I had a job that was a great job for a lifetime, get tenure, get locked in. I had a real marriage to an actual man. And it was, gosh, the level of privilege that they just throw at you when you have a normal heterosexual, cis, everything marriage, amazing. I had fabulous little children and my life was finished.

And then life started to say, “Um-hmm. Think again, think again. You gay. Think again. You hate academia.” I just kept thinking again and thinking again. And yeah, [inaudible 00:27:27].

Rowan Mangan:
I don’t think you were thinking, I don’t think it was a thought process. I think it was something else.

Martha Beck:
It was more like running into a window, right into a plate glass door over and over. So what about you? What was your experience with this in the culture?

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah, I think I have tried at various times to force myself into square four sort of from the same impulse I guess that you had of just, this is normal. For me, it was probably a little bit more like this is the mature thing to do at a certain time. You just settle yourself down and you get a real career.

Martha Beck:
Sure. Oh, yeah.

Rowan Mangan:
When I lived in Bangkok for a year and then I decided after this, no more traveling, no more going and living in other places. I know what I’ll do. I’ll get a dog and that will force me to stay still, forgetting how much my mom loves dogs and how she would do anything for me.

Martha Beck:
Lock it in. That dog will lock you in.

Rowan Mangan:
And just doing the dating apps, even if it made me miserable and stuff, getting a full-time job because it was like, it’s time. It’s time to be a grownup. I knew I was strangling my own joy, but there was also I think this sense of weariness of I can’t just keep endlessly not knowing what my job’s going to be. I can’t just endlessly. I’m sick of looking for someone to be in a relationship with. So this person, whoever comes along, if I can live with her, it would be better than the endless hunting and searching and trying and striving. And I think that that’s what the culture sells us on square four. It’s just like now I can relax. Now I can stop trying so hard, but I no longer think that there is such a destination, or that there should be.

Martha Beck:
Right. And it’s not fun to strive all the time. But here’s the way I would parse that out. You were striving hard and striving hard is a good thing. But you were striving hard for things that were strangling your joy and that’s not such a good thing. So when you let go of the cultural model of where you’re supposed to be in square four, strive all you want for something that comes from your soul’s heart, but don’t mix that up.

Rowan Mangan:
Because that doesn’t really feel like striving then, does it? It just feels like living.

Martha Beck:
Like you and I both write, and that can feel like striving for sure. But it’s striving for something that our hearts want us to do, right? Usually.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah.

Martha Beck:
And you went through IVF, which I’ve just got to say for anybody out there who’s gone through infertility treatments, nobody tells you how hard it is physically, psychologically. It is really a massive striving undertaking. And you did that and then you were pregnant and you’re like, I’m going to do this perfectly. And you read all the books and you knew how to have a perfect pregnancy. You had a birth plan. You knew exactly how the birth would happen and then, pandemic, woo, fun.

And I remember you coming in all pregnant the second day of lockdown and saying, “I don’t know whether they’ll let me see this baby when she’s born. I don’t know if I get this thing.” Because pregnant women were more susceptible, at least we thought so at that time, and I think it’s still true.

Rowan Mangan:
Babies were being separated at the point of birth from their mother to ostensibly protect them.

Martha Beck:
It’s horrifying.

Rowan Mangan:
But also women were giving birth by themselves. They weren’t allowed to have a support person there during the birth for a period of time during the pandemic. So there was just so much uncertainty about what the conditions would be. And it’s scary to think of being by yourself with a bunch of doctors having a baby so.

Martha Beck:
Well, whenever the stakes are high, it’s so normal for us to want to hold and grasp a thing that is fixed, that is reliable, that we know exactly how it’s going to happen. But the way your pregnancy worked really showed me, it doesn’t matter how high the stakes are, we are living in a time where the pace and degree of change are like nothing humanity has ever seen before. And that makes us able to plan things out way ahead of time. And it makes it more likely that things are going to scuttle our plans because, this didn’t scuttle our plans, but tornadoes now touch down on our street in Pennsylvania.

Rowan Mangan:
Well, it scuttled some of our plans not to spend the evening in our basement.

Martha Beck:
Yeah, I think it’s scuttled a lot of Adam’s plans. Adam, he looks out, he is like, “Is that a tornado?” He has Down’s Syndrome if you haven’t been listening. And we have to tell him. He does the little round and round motion and we’re like, “No, no, no. Those only happened in the Midwest.” It’s like, here it comes again. So yeah, we’re living in this time.

And I knew, as I said back in my twenties even when I was trying to grab and hold stability that we were going to go into a time of basically vertical growth in change. And I remember thinking when I did this study, wow, a career is not like a train anymore. We were looking at 20-year patterns of careers for graduates of Harvard Business School. And I thought, “Oh my gosh, it’s not a train track anymore. It’s more like a car. You can drive it around, maybe it even goes off-road.”

And then I realized that there is no road, that we are in conditions that are more like a choppy ocean with large swells. I just watched a whole bunch of huge wave surfer videos, not because I surf, but because it reminds me of what we’re going through in our lives. Everybody, right? There’s this dude on a board in this wave that they’re always going for the hundred-foot wave, which is like if you fell from a hundred feet, it would kill you. And they’re up on these waves and they’re surfing them, and I just stare at them and think that’s actually how we can do square four now. It’s the only way.

Rowan Mangan:
Those cup holders are starting to look better and better to me.

Martha Beck:
Exactly. Grab the cup holders. They may be your only defense.

Rowan Mangan:
Oh my gosh. All right. So scary. Change. Square four doesn’t look like it used to look if it ever did. So for God’s sake, how do we come to our senses?

Martha Beck:
You know wen I’m going to tell you.

Rowan Mangan:
When?

Martha Beck:
In a minute.

Rowan Mangan:
All right. Let’s figure this out.

Martha Beck:
Let’s do it, Rowie. Let’s do it.

Rowan Mangan:
So we were talking recently, Marty, about a mutual friend of ours who we love very dearly, but who has a tendency to make very big proclamations about their life. Like, here I’ve discovered the truth. Here is the truth and hence force, I… Hence force?

Martha Beck:
Hence force. Actually not an untrue slip of the tongue that.

Rowan Mangan:
Hence force.

Martha Beck:
Hence force.

Rowan Mangan:
Hence the fourth, I will live according to this solemn vow that I [inaudible 00:35:42].

Martha Beck:
And now I will be vegan. And then you talk to him three weeks later. Oh no, I eat nothing but meat. Yeah, it’s adorable. It’s adorable. It’s somebody really trying to do square four right, but kind of going with an old pattern.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah. Not what nature says is it?

Martha Beck:
No, only the culture says grab something, make a proclamation and hang onto it forever. They even have professions. I recently met a retired monk and, wow, how cool to have a thing where he could just say, I’m going to be a monk and that’s it forever. And the culture has categories like that for us, but nature does not.

Rowan Mangan:
Because you know what? You might meet a retired monk, but you’ll never meet a retired monkey.

Martha Beck:
Oh wait.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah?

Martha Beck:
Everybody wait.

Rowan Mangan:
Monkey culture says-

Martha Beck:
I don’t know what everyone else does.

Rowan Mangan:
Monkey is goddam nature.

Martha Beck:
My hat, my figurative hat is off to you, Rowan Mangan.

Rowan Mangan:
Thank you. Well, I hope you enjoy it. You’re never going to get a mic drop as cool as that one ever again.

Martha Beck:
Boo-yah.

Rowan Mangan:
Boo-yah.

Martha Beck:
Yeah. In nature, everything’s always changing everything.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah. So you don’t have that. You’ve got marriage, tick. Career, tick. And then it’s like you’ve made it kid. Now square four for us, so many of us, most of us is more like, okay, you’re on your surfboard. And it’s like, all right, so this week, all right, we just found out that tomorrow is a Monday and our daughter’s school’s closed. So it’s like, all right, surfboard, rearrange your position.

Martha Beck:
Rethink everything.

Rowan Mangan:
All right, this week is going to be, all right. So the next hour is going to be. And that’s how we do square four. We can have square four for an hour. Right?

Martha Beck:
Yeah. And what nature offers us is an image of something that is continuously changing. And from that position, a sort of reevaluation of what it means to hold on, what it means to last. And it’s an image that incorporates an infinite number of unimagined variations.

You watch a tree, I’m looking at the trees outside our windows, and they go through the same cycle. New growth, mid-summer, autumn, and sleep, which is what trees do in the winter. But every time they do it looks different. Every time they do it, the temperature’s different. The tulip poplar drops some of its leaves because we’ve had an unusually wet summer because of climate change. There are new birds in the trees. There are invasive bug species that they have to defend against. So they’re never the same. They’re always changing and it’s a total peace and there is a regularity to it, but it’s because it flows with the variations that come up.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah. The variability within the regularity.

Martha Beck:
And that reevaluation, I think we can make that click in our minds the way we value a moment, the way we value a day, the way we value the rest of our lives.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah. But I think we’re always having to strip back what the culture has tried to make us believe about what the trajectory should look like of life. Right?

Martha Beck:
Yes.

Rowan Mangan:
Relatively recently, we were at a concert.

Martha Beck:
Guess who’s

Rowan Mangan:
Might’ve been an Ani DiFranco concert? I’m not prepared to be drawn on this.

Martha Beck:
Maybe. I don’t really remember because she’s not interesting enough to remember it.

Rowan Mangan:
She’s fabulous.

Martha Beck:
Okay, go on.

Rowan Mangan:
All right, so we were at this concert. It hadn’t started yet, and I went to the bathroom and there was a conversation going on while ladies peed.

Martha Beck:
Actually, while people peed.

Rowan Mangan:
It was an all gender bathroom.

Martha Beck:
So they were all genders.

Rowan Mangan:
But it was interesting, the genders were actually still for the most part-

Martha Beck:
Peeing in different ways?

Rowan Mangan:
Peeing in different rooms.

Martha Beck:
Oh, interesting. I didn’t know.

Rowan Mangan:
It was interesting. But I think the point is they could feel comfortable going where they were comfortable.

Martha Beck:
Yeah, it was great.

Rowan Mangan:
In my area, there were some people sitting down to pee and a conversation was happening that was like, “Ah, we thought we got here so early thinking we’d be sure to get a seat only to find that we’ve got to this gig and it’s only standing room. And man, we’re so lame, we’re so old.” And I was waiting to wash my hands after this person. And I said to her, we just had the exact same conversation that we got here early, so we was going to get a seat. And then we’re so lame. We’re so old we don’t want to stand up all night. But of course in the end, we freaking loved it.

But what this woman said to me that was so cool, and it was like, God, you have some really interesting short encounters with people sometimes. And she said, “But what’s cool about the fact that we’re old and we’re at this gig here tonight is that we’ve lived long enough and we’ve loved Ani’s music long enough that we’ve both had the experience of seeing her in big venues, really big venues where it’s great, but it’s a completely different experience. And now we get to see her in this intimate one.” And well, it was a transporting gig.

So what the culture says about Ani DiFranco’s career trajectory is that you start out in basement bar music venues, and then you expand and you expand and you expand until your Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour and it’s all arenas and stuff. And so growth, growth, growth at all costs. And I know for sure that Ani DiFranco would think that was bullshit, and her career did get to that sort of playing in arena’s point.

But what happened in this room at this gig that we went to was you had people who loved her music so much squished up against each other, all standing up even though they were old, jumping up and down, everyone in the goddam room knowing every word to the song. And it was heaven. And that’s where culture says just grow and grow and get bigger and bigger. Nature is saying distill, enhance. Like savor, ripen, age.

Martha Beck:
Yeah. Age means something beautiful when it’s a wine. What if we can age into something more delicate, more multifaceted?

Rowan Mangan:
More complex.

Martha Beck:
Yeah.

Rowan Mangan:
And it also just made me think of the Cheryl Strayed title, which I think they’re made into a TV show. Tiny, Beautiful Things, and how a lot of beautiful things are tiny. And the more we can recognize the beauty in a lot of tiny things, the more, I don’t know, I feel like the more we’re holding steady on our surfboard.

Martha Beck:
Yeah. Well, I loved seeing her too because it was her birthday. We actually saw her perform on her birthday, and I don’t know how old she is, but I think like mid-fifties. But I couldn’t tell if she was wearing any makeup at all. I don’t think so. Her hair wasn’t particularly-

Rowan Mangan:
No, she doesn’t usually wear makeup.

Martha Beck:
And she’s one of those people who is ripening into age instead of just aging. She was completely comfortable being a tiny, beautiful thing. She is tiny and beautiful, but she’s beautiful in a way that it seems indifferent to age.

Rowan Mangan:
Might I provide you with a lyric on this topic?

Martha Beck:
What? You know lyrics off the cuff? Not even tattooed on your wrist?

Rowan Mangan:
Not yet. Not yet. So she has a line, “It took me too long to realize that I don’t take good pictures because I have the kind of beauty that moves.” Now if that’s not culture and nature.

Martha Beck:
And that’s our whole point about square four, is it’s flow, move, shift, let go, let go. And the holding on, the gripping is actually a way to destroy your life. If you are in Liz Gilbert’s… Sorry, that was a shift of something. It wasn’t in Liz Gilbert’s house or anything. If you’re in a relationship and you’re hanging on after it wants to let go. You want a square four that is no longer viable, you can hang on to something that becomes grotesque and horrifying.

Rowan Mangan:
Right. Oh yeah.

Martha Beck:
In Eat, Pray, Love, Liz talks about her divorce and her friends saying, “The day is ending. It’s time for something that was beautiful to turn into something else that is beautiful. Now let go.” And what happens then? We’ve been taught to believe that if you let go, what happens is the abyss, chaos, fragmentation, destruction.

Instead, what comes up is exactly what comes up after the forest has lain fallow for a season in winter. And what happens is a new season of generative explosion of creativity. If you’re in a state of continuous creativity, and that’s your surfboard. If you’re saying, okay, this is where I am, but where I am is the appreciation of the tiny beautiful things, and the appreciation of the flow of things, and you’re willing to let something that is beautiful give way to something else that is beautiful, then square four becomes joyful instead of frightening, or stale and tight.

Rowan Mangan:
And when you’re teaching the Wayfinder program, you have little mantras for each of the squares. And for square four it’s “Everything is changing and that’s okay.” Everything is still changing, is that what it is?

Martha Beck:
Yeah. So square one is, “I don’t know what the hell’s going on. And that’s okay,” if something’s just happened to you. Then square two is, “There are no rules. The old rules are all gone. I can be whoever I want to, and that’s okay.” Square three is, “This is a lot harder than I thought it would be, and that’s okay.” And square four, when I wrote this down in a book, it was “Change is coming and that’s okay.”

Rowan Mangan:
Right.

Martha Beck:
But I change it now to, “Change is continuous. Change is always happening, and that’s okay.”

Rowan Mangan:
And that’s okay. So I guess what we’re kind of proposing here, Marty, is that we all kind try and do our square fours differently so that instead of a kind of complacent or tightly held square four, we’re doing a creative square four. We’re doing a receptive square four where we’re on the lookout for the next change and we are ready to greet it instead of trying to fend it off somehow. Right?

Martha Beck:
Yeah. I love this TV series called the Hundred-Foot Wave, which I watched when we were on our way to Australia and on the way back. No, no, no. Bear with me now. Because they go out looking for the biggest waves there are, and they see them coming and they’re moving so fast that it takes a jet ski to put the surfer in place. So he’s water-skiing behind a jet ski. And the jet ski tries to put him at the very top, or her I don’t know if there were women, at the very top of this massive wave. And there’s this moment where they decide, do I let go or do I hang on. And one guy took his wife out and she was a brilliant surfer herself, but it was such a huge wave that she hung on and she got thoroughly smashed. The wave took her, it mashed her, and she said, “I’m never going to do that again because I like breathing. Thank you very much. It’s a fun habit. I want to keep it up.”

Rowan Mangan:
I respect and admire that person.

Martha Beck:
I do too, because that’s where nature is taking her. But you’d see people at this moment where if they let go, they were facing this unbelievable monstrous wave. But if they hung on it for sure would kill them. So at the moment they let go of the rope, I always get this little electric spark inside me because I felt that before, not in surfing, but in life. I’m on the lip of a huge change. You came into my life, we all fell in love, the three of us. And it was either shut this down, it’s weird, it’s strange, I can’t do this. Or drop the rope and take the wave.

Rowan Mangan:
Knowing that, in your metaphor, holding on could crush all your bones. It’s not like I’ll stick to safety because there’s no such thing as safety.

Martha Beck:
It isn’t. It isn’t. After we’d all had that bizarre falling in love with three people that we were so baffled by and nature did it because we didn’t control that at all. But if we’d tried to go back to normal, I think it would’ve destroyed my soul. I really do. It was that intense. And I do think that we get guidance in this very difficult time. So we know. Something’s telling us, this is the wave, drop the rope, and it’s super scary. But the ride is also really fun.

And in light of all this, as we’ve discussed it, Ro came up with the most brilliant life motto. I subscribe to it myself and I think I will get this tattooed on my body. So Rowie, please tell our listeners about our new forever vow.

Rowan Mangan:
Well, I wanted to be like our friend who makes proclamations. And it’s sort of in the same part of me that wants to get an awesome song lyric tattooed on my body. So I was talking to Marty and I finally really felt it inside myself. And so as of probably a week ago, I have now made a solemn vow too for the rest of my life see how it goes. Yeah. Every day.

Martha Beck:
Mic drop.

Rowan Mangan:
Every minute. I will never deviate from this way of living. I’ll just see how it goes.

Martha Beck:
I will see how it goes. Abso-freaking-lutely. That’s how you do square four in this day and age. So whatever you’re facing, if you’re facing a shocker, if you’re just like gliding along thinking everything’s fixed and fabulous, and you start to go, oh, but everything changes, I’m getting scared. Take a deep breath. Realize that nature wants you to surf this. You were born with the capacity to do this. Culture says it has to be rigid, but your nature can flow, wants to flow with whatever happens to you. So let go of the rope, drop the rope, and see what new beautiful thing that you’ve never imagined comes to fill the place you thought you would never change again.

Rowan Mangan:
And as you let go, don’t forget-

Martha Beck:
Stay wild.

Rowan Mangan:
Stay wild.

Rowan Mangan: 
We hope you’re enjoying Bewildered. If you’re in the USA and want to be notified when a new episode comes out, text the word ‘WILD’ to 570-873-0144.

We’re also on Instagram. Our handle is @bewilderedpodcast. You can follow us to get updates, hear funny snippets and outtakes, and chat with other fans of the show.

For more of us, Martha’s on Instagram, themarthabeck. She’s on Facebook, The Martha Beck, and she’s on Twitter, marthabeck. Her website is, MarthaBeck.com. And me, I too am on Instagram. Rowan_Mangan. I’m on Facebook as Rowan Mangan. And I’m on Twitter as RowanMangan. Bewildered is produced by Scott Forster with support from the brilliant team at MBI.