Martha Beck:
Hi, I’m Martha Beck.

Rowan Mangan:
And I’m Rowan Mangan. And this is another episode of Bewildered, that podcast for people trying to figure it out like her, like me. We’re in a new place. It’s weird. There’s so much to figure out.

Martha Beck:
Boy, you want to get bewildered? Come hang out at our place now. The bewilderment is so thick, you could cut it out with cookie cutters and bake it up for strangers.

Rowan Mangan:
What are you trying to figure out?

Martha Beck:
Oh God. Everything. I mean, I’m trying to figure out how to live in a house that has character. I have learned: the word squalor? No. Character. And actually it’s a really beautiful property, but I’m just going to say the former owner, well you know, had a very interesting relationship with objects in general and paint especially.

Rowan Mangan:
And you have very strong feelings about paint as a painter.

Martha Beck:
Very strong feelings.

Rowan Mangan:
I must say, I never knew that to paint a picture that your preferences that way would come across to how a house is painted.

Martha Beck:
And weirdly, because I’m such a mess of a human being, my painting and drawing is incredibly immaculate.

Rowan Mangan:
To compensate.

Martha Beck:
So, oh my God, when I paint a room, it is freaking immaculate. And this former owner, God rest in peace, we don’t know if she’s passed away.

Rowan Mangan:
She’s fine. She’s completely fine. She’s fine. She’s just living in the next town.

Martha Beck:
Wishful thinking. But you know what’s happening. I mean literally anything that was a problem she just took some weird color of paint and slapped it on. Got a problem? Is the wood moldy? Paint it up!

Rowan Mangan:
Are your power outlets too accessible?

Martha Beck:
Paint over ’em! Do the doorknobs give you trouble? Just hit ’em with a little splash of paint. But the worst thing is—and I haven’t even seen it, you and Karen have seen it—there was a thing she painted over…

Rowan Mangan:
Because we’d been building up all the different things that she would paint over. So it started with power outlets. It moved to really necessary key holes, painted, clogged with paint.

Martha Beck:
And paint as an alternative to cleaning.

Rowan Mangan:
Right. That’s a good point.

Martha Beck:
This is disgusting and it’s full of trash, so I will just paint over the whole thing. And then you and Karen found in the basement, she painted it over—speaking of rest in peace—dead mouse.

Rowan Mangan:
I hope he was dead at the time.

Martha Beck:
I know. An entire mouse. Not mouse droppings. Not mouse tracks.

Rowan Mangan:
Although, yes, mouse droppings.

Martha Beck:
The place is practically a mouse midden. A midden is where rhinos go to poop. They have poop middens. That’s what they have. And there are mouse middens in our house. We have a mouse midden house.

Rowan Mangan:
Marty, no one is ever going to come and visit us. You know that, right?

Martha Beck:
I know.

Rowan Mangan:
You are not painting a happy picture.

Martha Beck:
I’m figuring that out since I’m afraid of people. But I said to you, “What color was it that she painted it?” And you said…

Rowan Mangan:
“White.”

Martha Beck:
And I said, “But maybe it’s just lying there. Maybe it’s a white mouse.” And you said…

Rowan Mangan:
“It is. Now.”

Martha Beck:
So that’s the happiest thing to come out of that trip to the basement. And I’m trying to figure out how to cope with that and not run screaming into the woods.

Rowan Mangan:
Where there are bears.

Martha Beck:
That’s right. We heard a bear.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah. My mother arrived from Australia two nights ago, and as we came out to greet her, we realized that paving the path of welcome to our new house was all our trash from the last several days.

Martha Beck:
It was festive.

Rowan Mangan:
It was festive.

Martha Beck:
So festive.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah, it was lovely. But it was also exciting because a bear…

Martha Beck:
A bear had stepped in something liquid and then left clear dark footprints all around. Medium-sized bear. We were thrilled because we’re idiots.

Rowan Mangan:
Regular listeners will know that there is nothing Martha Beck likes more than an animal’s footprint on something.

Martha Beck:
Oh, I love the animal making the footprint equally much, but only because it can produce footprints.

Rowan Mangan:
So we’ve got a bear.

Martha Beck:
But we heard it. We were waiting for your mom to arrive. We were just relaxing after a hard day of moving in. And we heard this sound like [growls]. And I said, “Be quiet. Have we ever heard that sound before?” Because we’ve lived in the woods different places. California. Pennsylvania. Never heard this noise. It was like a very large old man upset because he couldn’t find his teeth.

Rowan Mangan:
Very much.

Martha Beck:
“They call this a trash midden?” And so it was very exciting and it just occurred to me, I thought it would be so nice if we could get a cat to deal with the mouse population, the mouse nation.

Rowan Mangan:
Get a cat to catch the mouse.

Martha Beck:
Yeah. She swallowed, she swallowed everything. But I don’t know why she swallowed the fly. Sorry. Cultural reference for those of you who didn’t grow up with that song, Google it. But here’s what I was thinking. We can’t get a cat because the former owner had a cat, which probably saved her from being entirely eaten by mice. And Lila met the cat and immediately put her face fully in the fur of the cat.

Rowan Mangan:
True.

Martha Beck:
Cat was very happy. Lila looked—

Rowan Mangan:
Our 4-year-old, for new listeners.

Martha Beck:
She looked like she’d gone 50 rounds with Mike Tyson. She’s, her whole face sort of swelled up. So we can’t get a cat.

Rowan Mangan:
We can get a bald cat.

Martha Beck:
We can get a bear.

Rowan Mangan:
Do bears eat mice?

Martha Beck:
Well, they probably scare them. That’s what you need. You need a house bear. We’ll have to make the dog door bigger. I love to make the doors bigger.

Rowan Mangan:
Oh, that’s hilarious.

Martha Beck:
What are you trying to figure out?

Rowan Mangan:
I am really happy to say that I actually have something that I’m working on trying to figure out that’s not moving related.

Martha Beck:
Really?

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah. Isn’t that wild?

Martha Beck:
How dare you? How very dare you distract from our project?

Rowan Mangan:
I have many dimensions.

Martha Beck:
You have many skills like Xena, Warrior Princess.

Rowan Mangan:
Thank you.

Martha Beck:
You have many skills.

Rowan Mangan:
Thank you. Well, this is just something I’m trying to figure out. So let’s not over-hype me.

Martha Beck:
Let’s not get hysterical. Okay.

Rowan Mangan:
So there is a man that I know and he is a personal trainer. He trains me personally. And you know how everyone has their special interests? And I learned about his recently when he told me about it with a lot of enthusiasm and I found it. I went away and I had to try and figure it out for a while.

Martha Beck:
Is it illegal?

Rowan Mangan:
No. It’s worse actually, in a strange way. So you know that awful thing that happens in life when someone forces you to watch sports, right?

Martha Beck:
Oh yeah.

Rowan Mangan:
You know that? And then inevitably, because sports are bad, someone hurts their body in a really horrifying way that makes your stomach go, “Oh!”

Martha Beck:
This is so you. I actually like sports and I’m quite interested when people get injured.

Rowan Mangan:
Okay. Wow. Wow.

Martha Beck:
I’m a real lesbian, okay?

Rowan Mangan:
Listen.

Martha Beck:
Yes. What?

Rowan Mangan:
All right, we have a whole conversation we’re going to have offline because that’s not a conversation to be had. I know that our listeners are with me. Someone forces you to watch sports, sports are bad, someone makes their body go in a weird way. Well, what my personal trainer did tell me was that he loves that.

Martha Beck:
What?

Rowan Mangan:
He loves that, and he reckons that his Rain Man superpower is that he knows what’s happened to their body by watching them. And he’s like, “Yeah, I can tell any injury. I can tell any injury. You just show me an injury.” And I’m like, “Yeah, but then they put it in super slow-mo and you have to watch all the bits going the wrong way.” And he’s like, “Yes, I know. And that’s how I know the exact tendon that has been ruptured.”

Martha Beck:
Oh! Okay, now you’re out of my territory. Yeah, I like it when the—

Rowan Mangan:
J’accuse!

Martha Beck:
Mea culpa. Yeah, I think that’s what you say. It’s my fault. It’s my fault. It’s a Catholic thing, I think. Yeah. I don’t like to, I like it when they wince.

Rowan Mangan:
You sadist.

Martha Beck:
I don’t like it when they scream or I’ve seen bones where you’re not supposed to see bones.

Rowan Mangan:
You know the ones I like? The soccer ones where they’re fake.

Martha Beck:
They fake it.

Rowan Mangan:
They’re like someone touches their thigh and they’re like, “Ohh!”

Martha Beck:
“My pretty princess thigh!”

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah, those are super fun. I would actually like to do that.

Martha Beck:
See, now we’re talking.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah, fake injuries? Fine. No problem. Actual joints going in the direction they’re not supposed to go? No, no. I am sorry. You can train me personally as much as you like. You are never going to make me watch the joints go backwards in super slow-mo.

Martha Beck:
Do you even think he’ll run out of sports injuries and become desperate to feed his addiction, and then he’ll train you into a weird position and watch you injure a specific tendon just for the pleasure?

Rowan Mangan:
Do you know what is so funny? So the reason that we got into having this conversation while he trained me personally was that I had to tell him that I’d really badly injured my toe walking down the stairs, but that I couldn’t do some of the personal training because I couldn’t walk down the stairs. And he’s like, “Yeah, elite athletes, pro footballers. I can tell which tendon.” And I’m like, “I don’t know how I got my toe because it followed my butt. I fell on my butt.”

Martha Beck:
Did he know? Did he know the tendons at work?

Rowan Mangan:
He seemed to. He was like, “Ah, hm.” Then he was like, “We’re going to mostly work on the upper body today.” So he must have known, right?

Martha Beck:
Intellect and character. Did you show him your toe?

Rowan Mangan:
No. See, I’m a compassionate soul. I don’t think anyone should have to see that stuff.

It was a grievous sight. I will attest.

I’m not even gonna, there are even words I could use to describe what happened to my toe that would chill you to the bone— Drew, our new producer, chill him to the bone.

Martha Beck:
Well, you know what I think that we should do? Because it did turn—

Rowan Mangan:
Our podcast?

Martha Beck:
Your toe did turn all kinds of colors. But you know what I think we could do to help? Paint over it.

Rowan Mangan:
That’s a really good point. At this moment.

Martha Beck:
I have figured it out.

Rowan Mangan:
Nice callback.

Martha Beck:
What’s our topic?

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah, let’s—moving on.

Martha Beck:
For God’s sake, Rowan, get to the point!

Rowan Mangan:
Hi there, I’m Ro and I’ll be your podcaster for today. Do you know how to tip your podcaster? It’s actually pretty easy. You can rate our pod with lots of stars, all your stars. You can review it with your best superlatives. You can even subscribe or follow Bewildered, so you’ll never miss an episode. Then of course, if you’re ready to go all in, our paid online community is called Wilder: A Sanctuary for the Bewildered. And I can honestly say it’s one of the few true sanctuaries online. You can go to wildercommunity.com to check it out. Rate, review, subscribe, join, and y’all have a great day now.

Now, our listeners will never be able to figure out how we came up with this topic, but I’m going to give them a little thought exercise. All right? Now you may notice if you’ve watched us before on the YouTube vision thing that we have different surrounds. And what you may not know is that unlike our usual podcasting mode, what we do not have this time is help. Help! Preparation.

Martha Beck:
This always happens. I’m all ready to broadcast and then, or to record, and I start screaming, “Help!” and Ro has to run down the hall from her room.

Rowan Mangan:
So this time we have no help. Well, we have actually a lot more help.

Martha Beck:
That’s the thing—we have help.

Rowan Mangan:
We don’t have anything to read from. So today’s podcast is called Flying Blind, ladies and gents, you’ll never guess why. Hi, Marty.

Martha Beck:
Hi Roey.

Rowan Mangan:
Flying blind, eh? That happens in life metaphorically.

Martha Beck:
No idea what I’m doing, yes, it has happened.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah, as a metaphor.

Martha Beck:
But, yeah, as a metaphor. So give us the image.

Rowan Mangan:
Picture this. I feel like I’m pitching in Hollywood.

Martha Beck:
You are.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah. Picture this. You find yourself, we open on the cockpit of a plane.

Martha Beck:
A 747.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah, a 747 plane because it’s 1986. And we, you are the captain, but—

Martha Beck:
Not me.

Rowan Mangan:
Whoever’s listening. Yeah, you are the Hollywood mogul that I’m pitching the thing to.

Martha Beck:
Yes. Oh, okay. Of course I am.

Rowan Mangan:
You just have to say, “Keep pitching. Keep pitching. I like it.” Okay, so as you gaze out upon your many, many instruments that you are required to use to fly the plane to its destination, everyone’s counting on you.

Martha Beck:
Everyone.

Rowan Mangan:
The stakes are high.

Martha Beck:
Very.

Rowan Mangan:
All the instruments are what? They’re gone? They’re in Cyrillic?

Martha Beck:
They’re not working, they’re making things. You try to turn left and it goes down. Or all of the instruments are malfunctioning or dead.

Rowan Mangan:
Oh! The lady who sold us our house has painted over the windscreen of the plane.

Martha Beck:
That’s exactly—and the instrument panel and a dead mouse, right there.

Rowan Mangan:
Right there in the middle of the—

Martha Beck:
So it’s all painted over and you’re up in the sky with this big hunk of metal. And it’s your job to fly it. And that big hunk of metal in the sky is your life.

Rowan Mangan:
Metaphorically.

Martha Beck:
Metaphorically. And the instrument panel is everything you’ve been taught culturally, socially, since you were little about how to fly the plane and how to fly your life.

Rowan Mangan:
Learn to use the toilet, learn to put your shoes on the right feet, learn to write your name, and then so on and so forth until you make babies, check your 401k.

Martha Beck:
Yeah. School, college, work, marriage, baby, death.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah, those are the instruments. Metaphorically.

Martha Beck:
Wait, we skipped over people getting plastic surgery at certain points.

Rowan Mangan:
Yes. Well.

Martha Beck:
Then death.

Rowan Mangan:
Okay. Yeah. So when we start to live outside the culture, which is a lifestyle that we endorse on Bewildered.

Martha Beck:
Yes. Be Wilder, Ed. Be wilder.

Rowan Mangan:
Ed, come on, Ed.

Martha Beck:
Instead of coming to consensus, come to your senses. Okay, go on.

Rowan Mangan:
Ed never listens to us.

Martha Beck:
I hate Ed.

Rowan Mangan:
We keep talking to him and telling him to be wilder. Yes. So we think you should go by your nature, not by what the culture says. But if you start doing that, early on you’re going to find that you’re used to having these instruments to fly by.

Martha Beck:
It’s all you’ve learned to do. And you’re very used to using ’em and you trust them. And by this, it’s like, okay, I feel lonely. Okay, you get a certain type of partner, a certain age, a certain gender. I know.

Rowan Mangan:
I see where you’re going with this.

Martha Beck:
Just getting a little self-referential. But okay, then you have a standard marriage, and that’s how—and it has to last to the end of your life, which is supposed to be quite long. And that’s it. That’s the answer. It’s the only answer, right? If you don’t know how to support yourself, you get a good job. You get a W2, you get the thing, the 401k, as you said. These are the instruments you’ve learned to trust.

Rowan Mangan:
College degree. Yeah. Pieces of paper that say things that you hang on your wall and then you feel safe.

Martha Beck:
Yeah. And you buy a house that has no dead mice painted over.

Rowan Mangan:
Ideally. Yeah.

Martha Beck:
Yeah. I mean, but it’s supposed to work a certain way. And your body is supposed to work a certain way. Your desires are supposed to work a certain way. Your business life is supposed to work a certain way. Your health, your government is going to take care of it all. The government has designed the panel and given it to you, and it’s the one shouting directions at you. Only, honestly, in our world today, it’s like they’re shouting in some sort of weird echolalia.

Rowan Mangan:
They’re just shouting. They’re shouting like an old man who is blaming you that he can’t find his teeth.

Martha Beck:
That’s basically all you’re getting these days.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah, totally. And so any one of these things can happen to upset your—you can choose to go, “I’m going to live a bit outside the culture. I’m going to marry a woman, maybe I’m going to marry two. Who knows? Let’s just see. I’m going to move into a house that’s full of mice.” And as you begin to live this way, you suddenly realize that without the instruments, you’ve got to learn to operate in a completely different way. And there are people who’ve listened to this podcast before that will have heard this metaphor. Probably the best metaphor ever, of all time.

Martha Beck:
We should put it in the metaphor hall of fame.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah. I really think it would stack up quite well against a little guy called William Shakespeare, for instance. Okay. Best metaphor of all time here it comes. In Battlestar Galactica, when Starbuck has to fly the Cylon spaceship and she realizes, “Holy shit, this spaceship is an animal and it’s made out of meat, and I got to fly the meat.” And you are that Cylon spaceship. You are the meat plane.

Martha Beck:
Okay, I’ve got to fly the meat. That right there is—

Rowan Mangan:
I imagine that’s what straight people say to themselves.

Martha Beck:
I’m just going to get up in the morning if I don’t, if I’m trying to figure it out. I’m just going to scream, “I’ve gotta fly the meat!”

Rowan Mangan:
Actually, let’s not call this episode Flying Blind. Let’s call it Flying the Meat. So something’s happened. You have chosen to live outside the culture, or the culture has kicked you out. Your body is, you have chronic illness, your body’s not going to perform the way that you have a different kind of brain and a nine-to-five job isn’t going to work for you. So there’s all these different ways that either by choice or by circumstance, we get—our instruments are not going to work for us. And so what we wanted to talk about today, or for instance, you upgrade your amazing podcast setup so that you don’t have to have a screen in front of you.

Martha Beck:
And then you’re flying blind.

Rowan Mangan:
And then you’re totally flying blind.

Martha Beck:
Who knows what will happen? We must find new instruments.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah. And so that’s what we want to talk about. Now tell me something, Marty, what does the culture say about flying blind?

Martha Beck:
Oh, it’s terrible. It’s shameful. It’s never going to work.

Rowan Mangan:
Gotta have your GPS, gotta have your bits of paper, gotta have a plan, gotta have a log book.

Martha Beck:
Gotta conform, gotta have a certain type of friend, gotta have a certain type of relationship.

Rowan Mangan:
Everyone’s plane is the same as everyone else’s plane.

Martha Beck:
Absolutely. It always works the same way for everybody. And if you can just learn to do it right, you’ll be fine. “But my instruments don’t work.” “That doesn’t matter. Do it anyway,” says the culture,

Rowan Mangan:
You know what? It’s not, “You’ll be fine.” It’s “You’ll be safe.”

Martha Beck:
You’ll be safe.

Rowan Mangan:
If you do this, you’ll be safe. And that’s in a way why the metaphor of flying blind is so good. Because flying is scary.

Martha Beck:
Yes, it is.

Rowan Mangan:
And being on the ground feels safer, but flying when someone’s painted over your windscreen.

Martha Beck:
Okay, that too. But the instrument panel as well.

Rowan Mangan:
So yeah, it’s multilayered.

Martha Beck:
Yeah. Interesting. So one of the reasons the instrument panel has been designed is that—

Rowan Mangan:
Metaphorically.

Martha Beck:
Metaphorically, it’s in that hierarchically shaped society I’m always talking about. And everyone, people rise to the top and make the rules, make the instrument panels, but they’re very few and their position is quasi-parental. They’re going to make everything work. So there’s a company that you go to and you’ve got, it’s 50,000 people, and at the top there are the parents, and you do your job at the bottom and you use the instruments the way you’ve been told to and everything will be fine and you will be given the means of sustenance. What you will never be given is instructions on ways to live without the structure.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah, yeah. So it’s like there’s always that figure. It’s parent and then it’s teacher, and then it’s professor, and then it’s boss.

Martha Beck:
Yes.

Rowan Mangan:
And those are all stand-ins for the culture at large. But the point is that you never have to choose anything for yourself. You are always responding. You’re always doing your homework.

Martha Beck:
Doing your chores, and getting your allowance. Doing your chores, and getting a place to live. The problem right now is that all the parental figures are either, they’re either falling apart or they’re diabolical.

Rowan Mangan:
And the parental structure is bullshit to begin with.

Martha Beck:
Right.

Rowan Mangan:
That’s already a flawed system because we’re not children.

Martha Beck:
And basically, “Do your chores, oops, we don’t have any allowance for you. Just do more chores.” That whole idea that you’ll be cared for if you conform—it’s a broken promise a thousand ways from Sunday in our particular moment in history. It’s not working. The instrument panel and the windscreen have been painted over. So in a way, most of us are flying blind. I watch people fall like dominoes as different social changes from on high impact their lives, impact their income, impact their jobs. And I’m watching people starting to fly blind and panicking.

Rowan Mangan:
Marty, would you tell the story of watching on YouTube the tsunami?

Martha Beck:
Yeah. So in 2011 there was a huge tsunami that eradicated a lot of cities in Japan, but the one it really killed was called Sendai. And someone in Sendai, Japan heard the horns blaring and then speaking in Japanese, like “Find higher ground.” And he turned on his camera. I don’t know who he was. You know it’s a he because you can hear him panting. But he ran out of his house and up onto a hill. And tsunamis, tidal waves do not come in as a wall of water like they do in the movies. No, no, no. That would be a giant wave of a different sort. Most tsunamis rise from the bottom up. So what you see, he’s on this hill, he’s overlooking all of Sendai, Japan. And then you see there’s water in the streets and you think, “Oh, the whole town’s getting a bit wet.”

And then the water rises, and it starts to reach the doors, like the bottom of the doors. It starts flowing into stores and houses and you’re like, “Oh, there’s going to be some water damage.” And then it rises and now it’s halfway up the door, and now the first floor doors are completely underwater. And now it’s getting in the second story windows. And now there are cars floating by with people in them. There are boats coming down the streets. And the wave continues to rise for six astonishing minutes, which is a really long time to sit and watch a disaster but a very brief time to eradicate an entire city. One wave. And at about five and a half you see this strange dust rising over the city. And it’s weird because it’s water. And then you realize that all the buildings have been shaken off their foundations and are beginning to break. And it’s the mortar and the wood dust from the breakdown of the houses that you’re seeing as a cloud. And then all the buildings start to wash away and the guy runs to higher ground and just films the city floating away, six minutes after being bone dry. And I watched that and I thought, “There are people who ran into those structures to be safe. Where are they? What’s happening? This is not okay.” And then should I tell the other half of that?

Rowan Mangan:
Well just decode that. We’re not just telling the story because it’s horrifying. The story is a really brilliant metaphor for what are the structures?

Martha Beck:
So yeah, the more we see a structure as being full of authority and tradition and history and money and force, the more stability, we run into those structures to be safe in a time of chaos. That’s what we’ve been taught to do. That’s part of flying the plane. If in a disaster, run to the biggest solid, most authoritarian structure.

Rowan Mangan:
Authoritarian, yeah.

Martha Beck:
Okay. Point taken. But people have historically run into authoritarian structures because they appear very strong. In fact, they appear stronger than authoritative. So when you run into those, change continues and it’s starting to loosen the foundations of those huge reliable institutions, like I don’t know, the publishing industry. That was a safe job. Not anymore.

Rowan Mangan:
Government work.

Martha Beck:
Yes. If that’s where you are, trying to be safe, you don’t have a way to be safe. You’re not going to be okay. It’s all going to be washed away so quickly. It’s crazy.

Rowan Mangan:
So we can no longer, in this environment we’re living in that is governed by change happening rapidly in all directions. It’s not just coming from one place between the climate issues. I mean there’s so much.We want to run into the buildings. The buildings aren’t safe. So tell us what happened to you when you watched the video? What happened next?

Martha Beck:
I love the phrase you just used. We’re living in a time that is governed by change. That’s the real, that’s the actual force that’s making everything happen, right? Change, entropy, all that stuff. Okay. So I watched this video of Sendai being watched away like 50 times one night, couldn’t sleep, just kept watching it. I kept waiting for it to end differently. Right? I’m waiting for the hero to show up and save the day. Nope. Because that was my way of thinking.

Rowan Mangan:
That was your instrument.

Martha Beck:
A hero’s going to show up and save the day. And not me because I’m just a kid. Somebody, a big person needs to do it.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah.

Martha Beck:
I’m not big enough. Me, a former baby? So you know how YouTube is arranged so that it gives you options of other videos that are similar? I must’ve accidentally clicked on a different video because I was going to watch Sendai again. And instead what I got was a video of a surfer in a competition, a big-wave surfing competition. And I think the waves were 40 feet high typically at this place, which is four stories, which is like imagine.

Rowan Mangan:
It’s like those surfing competitions where you are way out at sea. It’s not like at the beach. They come on jet skis and stuff. So just to give context, because otherwise a 40-foot wave is not—

Martha Beck:
A 40-foot wave is huge. If you want to read all about it, read Susan Casey’s book, The Wave. Brilliant, amazing book. Brilliant. So sometimes as you will read in Susan Casey’s brilliant book, The Wave, the forces combine to create what’s called a rogue wave. And two waves connect together and they combine their forces and the wave becomes immense. And what you see is a guy being jet skied out, he lets go of the rope from the jet ski and here’s this dude in a pair of shorts with a board and the ocean, the old man and the sea, whatever. And you see it rising, the wave rising. And it’s filmed from a helicopter which has to keep pulling back further and further and further because the rogue wave goes up and up and up and up and up until it’s I think 74 feet high. Think of a seven-story building.

And this wave does not come from underneath. It is high. And he is tiny. He’s like a gnat on the top of this wave. He’s naked, he has like nothing. And then as it starts to crest, he cuts down the surface almost vertically for a very long time. And then the wave comes over him and the amount of white water, I swear it splashes onto the helicopter, which is way up in the sky. It’s huge. It is like the wrath of God. And you hear this sound like he is dead, he is absolutely dead. And you watch it all in horror and the whitewater keeps foaming and then suddenly out of the foam comes Mike Parsons standing on a board, whooping, having just had the ride of his life. And I thought—I watched that over and over—and then I thought the safest thing to do when you are in a world governed by change is to strip down to the very bare minimum that can keep you modest.

Rowan Mangan:
The most important thing when everything is pulling apart is modesty.

Martha Beck:
That’s right.

Rowan Mangan:
Can you spot the former Mormon?

Martha Beck:
Okay, so now, okay, go out naked, I don’t care. Go out naked with a board and deal with the change, dance with the change, ride the change, find joy and a thrill in the absolute terror of this massive change. And that way you will be safer than if you are busy running into the nearest government office to stay safe from a tsunami.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah. Yeah. So I’m curious to hear about now that we’ve got these two images, I love that in this podcast we just give them metaphor, metaphor, metaphor. Metaphor.

Martha Beck:
Metaphor stew. One of my kids once told me, “Mom, it must be great to make a living mixing metaphors.” And it is.

Rowan Mangan:
I just want to ask you, what are times when you have been, I’m trying to fit it to the tsunami rogue wave metaphor isn’t when you tried to run into a building, but the instrument panel on the wave—

Martha Beck:
With a board in the cockpit—

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah. What happened when you were on the surfboard and the panel of instruments—oh God.

Martha Beck:
Just go with us, guys. Just ride the change. Ride the change.

Rowan Mangan:
Just ride this weird thing.

Martha Beck:
No, I mean I say this over and over again because it was such an overwhelming thing for me. But when I left my religion and culture of origin, you’ve got to remember Mormonism, which is what raised me, is a life world religion, which means you’re supposed to literally give your thoughts to the church. So I literally grew up trying earnestly to force my very thoughts into a pattern that was acceptable to the church and every single action, everything. And I left it all at once, boom. And I was utterly blind. I had so few skills to cope with life and nothing worked outside of Mormonism the way it did inside. So I was all like, I don’t even know. Just the other day we had guests over to dinner and I poured some wine for them and they looked at it and went, “That’s a lot of wine.” And I’m like, “How much do people give each other? I don’t know. I’m flying blind on a wave in a cockpit with the dead mouse. It’s horrifying. How should I know what wine to give?”

Rowan Mangan:
What wine to serve on the surfboard of change?

Martha Beck:
Yeah. It’s not on the panel.

Rowan Mangan:
I’m really tempted to bring the Titanic into this, but we shouldn’t. No.

Martha Beck:
Tell me a time it happened to you.

Rowan Mangan:
I have nothing like that sort of story at all. But what I started thinking about was the way that little outings into flying blind is kind of one of my happy places. So traveling, having done a lot of solo travel, it’s almost like you’re setting yourself up to, I don’t do tours. I have always just, I get a backpack and I go a place that I don’t much about, and I get by. And getting by itself—I mean within reason, I’m not going to war zones and stuff. And I think about how once you start putting yourself in those situations for fun and practice, you’re starting to build muscles that you can use when the tsunami comes and you need to grab your surfboard in the cockpit with the buttons that don’t—because of the mouse.

Martha Beck:
I have so many images of you busking in Ireland, skiing in Kyrgyzstan. I mean you have practiced this.

Rowan Mangan:
So I was in a town in Northwestern India, not far from the border with Pakistan, and it’s a town called Jaisalmer. And it is the most fascinating place. It’s like, it’s 11th century.

Martha Beck:
Oh my god.

Rowan Mangan:
A city that all the buildings are, no one fact check, don’t fact check me on this, but all the buildings are carved out of sandstone, really elaborately. And it’s like this one place on the planet where the climate is such that—dry enough and all of that—that it hasn’t eroded.

Martha Beck:
Wow.

Rowan Mangan:
But the streets are this wide.

Martha Beck:
Wow.

Rowan Mangan:
And I am just telling the story because of how when you put yourself into a flying blind situation, the stuff that happens is, it’s like when you’re riding the, sorry, keep going back. You really can have the ride of your life, kind of thing, as well as building the skills to fly blind when it’s real, when it’s you know.

Martha Beck:
You do get very relaxed in fly-blind situations.

Rowan Mangan:
That’s interesting. Yeah. So I was, the street’s as wide as two people, but it’s India, so there’s a cow.

Martha Beck:
Of course there is. I was going to say just wide enough for a cow.

Rowan Mangan:
Just wide enough for a cow. In India, there’s always a cow.

Martha Beck:
Just one. But he’s everywhere.

Rowan Mangan:
He gets around. She. So I’m there. Building on either side, cow, and I’m trying to get past the cow, and I’m vaguely aware that at the other end of the cow, someone else is trying to also get past the cow.

Martha Beck:
In the opposite direction?

Rowan Mangan:
Yes. Coming towards me.

Martha Beck:
Oh goodness.

Rowan Mangan:
So we are both, and there’s this kind of nervous laughter that’s going on as we both navigate this really unprecedented sort of situation. It’s not like one of those, “You know when you’re in that 11th-century sort of town and you’re trying to get by?”

Martha Beck:
I hate it when that happens.

Rowan Mangan:
So we managed to, I don’t even know how, I think the thing about cows is that they’re lovely. They’re lovely people.

Martha Beck:
I was going to say, was it the cow laughing, actually? You said there was nervous laughter.

Rowan Mangan:
All three us. But the cow was lovely, so we kind of snuggled up and got around. Anyway, and literally it was about five minutes of negotiation, he gets up here to my end, I’ve helped the cow get to the side. He comes, I finally properly make eye contact with him, and he’s a famous Australian comedian.

Martha Beck:
Oh my God.

Rowan Mangan:
Called Andrew Denton, for the Aussies. I mean comedian-TV personality. And there I am in this remote Indian town trying to get past a cow, as you do. And it was just the most surreal celebrity sighting I could ever imagine. And he saw me recognize him and he genuinely understood how weird that moment was for me. Like, “Oh, because, and then the aha and the nervous laughter and then it’s me. Yeah, that must be weird for you.” And I was like, “It is. Thank you for your work. Bye.”

Martha Beck:
Well, that’s interesting though. When you do go into the fly-blind zone, weird stuff happens. Synchronicities. We’re getting woo-woo already. Because really when you decide to ignore the instrument panel and you start to steer it some other way, which we need to talk about in a minute, it opens the non-pattern, the non-cultured world to you. It is Be-Wilder-ing. And it turns out that wilder is much more magical and you have all kinds of strange…. I thought I was really famous because we went into a bookstore here in the Kingston area where we’re living, and we went in, and he said, “You’ll love this bookstore.” And I did because I was recognized by three different people who were like, “Thank you for your work. It’s really helped me.” I was in heaven. I’ve been to that bookstore every chance I get. I mean, wow, if that’s what I get, I’m going back for another treat. No one knows who I am.

Rowan Mangan:
We went there this morning and I saw a dog wag its tail as you walked by.

Martha Beck:
He’s read my work.

Rowan Mangan:
It really helped him.

Martha Beck:
If only it had been a cow.

Rowan Mangan:
I know. I know. This is cool. Yeah, there’s something about the flying blind thing where it’s, it’s scary, but you learn to surf it. And I mean, I think the reality of living on earth at this moment in time is that we are just going to need to keep building that muscle. The unprecedented shit is just continuing to happen.

Martha Beck:
Yep, it sure is.

Rowan Mangan:
And so let’s get better at this. And so I think we should talk about how do we come to our senses when it’s nothing but waves?

Martha Beck:
We will tell you about it in just a minute.

Rowan Mangan:
So, Marty.

Martha Beck:
Yes.

Rowan Mangan:
When we’re on our wave/cockpit/running into—

Martha Beck:
When we’re surfing in a 747 made of meat.

Rowan Mangan:
In 1986, yes, we need to learn how to do that without the instruments of the culture. Right. And very much, I would say what everyone’s thinking, like Starbuck trying to ride the Cylon meat spaceship, very much like that.

Martha Beck:
Keep track of these metaphors, people.

Rowan Mangan:
And so I would like to ask you, what is our, the instruments of our true nature if we’re coming out of the culture of consensus and into our actual coming to our senses?

Martha Beck:
This is what made my career because when I left Mormonism, I had to start from the bare boards. I had to start from the ground. There were no boards. And I just was like, “How do I live my life? How do I make choices?” And I began to start paying more attention to very granular sensations. And I found out that my body was actually incredibly intelligent. I’d been in chronic pain for 12 years and autoimmune diseases, a bunch of ’em all incurable. And yet I noticed that the pain would go up a little when I made a certain choice, usually to try to get back into a large structure, into that authoritarian sort of image of parents who were going to take care of me. I would do that. I would get pain, like real systemic pain, organs starting to break down. And then I’d make a different decision, and suddenly I had energy and less pain. And I was like, “Whoa, this is interesting.” And that became my first guideline. Go to what—if I make this choice, what does my body do? If I make the opposite choice, what does my body do when I’m not trying to control it?

Rowan Mangan:
Give us an example.

Martha Beck:
So I was teaching, I was an assistant professor at the time, and I would drive to campus to go to a faculty meeting. And by the time I got to campus, I would be so physically weak and in so much pain that I couldn’t open the door of the car, that it was all I could do to walk into a building. It was like I was being pushed backwards by pain. But some days I didn’t have to go to campus, some days—because that’s how college life is—I would stay home. And I had started writing a novel, which would become my first memoir. Suddenly no pain, no fatigue, no loss of energy. It got really strong. So I quit my job, ultimately, and I don’t know if I’ve told this story before, but it’s worth telling again, the dean said, “We need women, you have to stay on, we’ll pay you anything.” And I said, “You don’t understand. If I stay in this job, I will have to go on massive doses of antidepressants just to show up.” And the dean said, “Well, I’m on antidepressants.”

Rowan Mangan:
Just to show up.

Martha Beck:
But I would’ve died. I literally think I would’ve physically found a way to make a disease kill me.

Rowan Mangan:
So it’s kind of interesting because it’s almost like your body gave you very strong feedback that helped you kind of start learning to work with it.

Martha Beck:
Yeah, the meat machine was very obvious for me.

Rowan Mangan:
And I think for most of us it’s much more subtle. Like when you do the Wayfinder Life Coach Training that you run, this body compass idea is something that you teach early on. And it’s such a fascinating kind of, you learn—because all our bodies are different, all our meat spaceships are different.

Martha Beck:
I’m on a meat space ship in a tsunami.

Rowan Mangan:
It’s like you go to court, “Your Honor, I’m just trying to fly my own meat spacechip. Okay?”

Martha Beck:
Then a tsunami sweeps the courtroom away.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah, fade to black.

Martha Beck:
Another metaphor for those who don’t have enough. Okay, talk to me. Tell me, you went through the life coach training.

Rowan Mangan:
I went through the life coach training. And so I did that and I learned that it can be so subtle and it’s so unique to everyone’s body, but it is the body. It’s never a thought, it’s always a feeling. So the first thing that we have to do is in a very literal come-to-your-senses way is like, “What’s going on for me when I am embarking on a path that is not the right path for me?” Because our bodies know fucking early, way before our minds do.

Martha Beck:
Way early. Could I give a little example from Malcolm Gladwell? In Blink, he’s talking about this experiment where subjects had to choose from a red pile of cards and a blue pile of playing cards. And they were supposed to get a certain number of points and one of the decks was stacked against them. Let’s say it was the red one. So if you picked cards randomly, the red pile was stacked against you, but it gave you a few big wins. The blue pile would give you steady small wins and not any disasters, but the big win at the beginning made the red pile look better. So it took people 80 cards to start to realize that the red pile was…something wrong with that. But when they measured the perspiration of their hands, which is a sign of anxiety, after they pulled just 10 cards, their hands would sweat more when they reached for the red deck. After 10 cards, the body-mind had already noticed that the red deck was stacked. It’s incredibly wise.

Rowan Mangan:
Right. That’s so cool. But I wonder if those signals are going to be fairly uniform, like the sweating of the hands and that sort of thing. But I feel like there’s also all these things you have to figure out for yourself in terms of what it feels like from the inside.

Martha Beck:
Yes.

Rowan Mangan:
That sort of interoceptive….

Martha Beck:
Neuroception, yeah. How do you feel on the inside of your body. Interoception, neuroception, yeah.

Rowan Mangan:
And so the cool thing that we do in the coach training is that you have us go through this exercise where it’s like you have to do, imagine yourself in the worst situation and really go into it physically and start actually logging the physical sensations that go along with that.

Martha Beck:
A bad choice, a wrong turn.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah. Imagine it as a spectrum. So she has, there’s minus 10, there’s zero, which is that you don’t feel much of anything sort of neutral. And then there’s plus 10, the best thing ever. And you start to be able to feel the more subtle ones because they’re more like they’re heading in the direction of that very noticeable negative 10.

Martha Beck:
Can I make a generalization for people who aren’t in the coach training? Because it’s quite detailed.

Rowan Mangan:
You don’t want me to try and paraphrase your work in front of you to you any longer?

Martha Beck:
I just feel like I need to run into the structure of authority systems.

Rowan Mangan:
That is Martha Beck?

Martha Beck:
That is me. I’ve worked with thousands of people, and this thing is incredibly reliable. But there’s one generalization that I can make, and that is when you’re making a decision that is wrong for you, off course for you specifically, even though we don’t know what your future’s meant to hold, there will be tension in the body. When you make a move towards something that is right for you, even if you’re afraid of it, there will be loosening in the body, relaxation, opening. So a sense of closing intention, a sense of freedom and openness. So it boils down to which choice sets you free as registered by your body’s relaxation.

Rowan Mangan:
We had to name, give a unique name for our worst thing and our best thing. I can’t remember my worst thing, although I think yours is the ton of bricks.

Martha Beck:
Ton of gravel.

Rowan Mangan:
So you can feel that. But I always remember when I did this exercise that for me, the feeling of the absolute, spot-on, you are right on target, this is the right thing. I called it “tingly cathedral.” And so there was a frisson, but there was also to your point, that sense of huge expansive space. And there’s always that. It’s always that opening.

Martha Beck:
But it’s coming from the inside. It’s so weird how the vastness opens up. As you stop trusting the instrument panel the culture gives you, and you start turning in toward biological and then emotional—well, that’s biological too—and even intuitive compasses, what happens is that you discover this vast fund of wisdom, energy, motivation, like everything starts to fly the way it was meant to fly. And after a while, for a while, it’s like, “Damn, I wish the instrument panel was still working.” And then after a while you’re like, “No, this’ll do, this’ll do.” And then you’re like, “Oh, this is going to take me to a new place.”

Rowan Mangan:
Right. And so you’re just making those subtle adjustments of course, all the time where you’re like, “Oh no, that’s starting to feel closer to the no. Let’s turn this way. Oh, that’s starting to feel better.”

Martha Beck:
Example, we went for coffee before we came here.

Rowan Mangan:
That was a great choice, by the way.

Martha Beck:
Yes. For you. But I was standing in line with you and I thought, coffee? Tension, immediately. Okay, no coffee. Relaxation, immediately. Tiny choices like that. If you can do it with a cup of coffee and then you start doing it with how you spend the hours of your day, and then you start using that to decide who you’re going to hang out with and what work you’re going to do and how to keep your body healthy, you learn to fly the way Mike Parsons was surfing. Right.

Rowan Mangan:
Just minuscule decision by minuscule decision.

Martha Beck:
Yeah. Like you’re balancing and adjusting continuously, but you trust your instrument, which is now your body and your intuition and your emotions and everything connected to it, your spirituality, all of that. And instead of constant horror in a world governed by change, you’re like, “Okay, bring it. Let’s do this. This could be fun.”

Rowan Mangan:
This could be fun. And that exact feeling is how we…stay wild.

Martha Beck:
Stay wild.

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.