Rowan Mangan:
And I’m Rowan Mangan. And this is another episode of Bewildered, the podcast for people trying to figure it out. And we have had a few things to figure out this morning, Marty.

Martha Beck:
Yeah. I blame Mercury because everyone else blames Mercury -the planet, not the god or maybe the god. I don’t even know. I’m not good at these things. But it’s in retrograde, I guess.

Rowan Mangan:
Is it?

Martha Beck:
I don’t know exactly.

Rowan Mangan:
It usually is. It seems to be more-

Martha Beck:
It always is. And if you can’t get your sound to work and if they’ve changed the app that records your podcast in mysterious ways, it’s not a human error folks. It’s Mercury.

Rowan Mangan:
It has to be the planets.

Martha Beck:
I was blaming Mars a few minutes ago.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah. Well I mean, can we be sure? I blame Saturn. I mean, Saturn is up to something.

Martha Beck:
I think Jupiter or maybe… I know it’s Pluto because it’s mad that first it’s a planet then it is not a planet then it’s just a big rock then it’s a planet again. I mean, what’s the problem here? I’m going to mess up people’s Instagram feeds.

Rowan Mangan:
Instagram not being our particular technical issue.

Martha Beck:
No, no. That podcast; it goes without saying. Anyway, yeah, we’ve been trying to figure it out for a while here. But Roey…

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah?

Martha Beck:
What have you been trying in your life apart from these moments? What are you trying to figure out?

Rowan Mangan:
What am I trying to figure out? I was thinking this morning about trying to figure out how to be me, how to be a mom, and how to be a person who goes out for dinner once in a while. These things together are confusing to me. And that should tell you just how easily confused I am. Because we went out for dinner; it was our beloved Karen’s birthday recently. So we did the very… We took the unusual step of leaving the house. I know.

Martha Beck:
Unusual step.

Rowan Mangan:
I know.

Martha Beck:
Do we have to go to such levels?

Rowan Mangan:
It was… I mean, listeners, we got in the car, we hired a babysitter, we… I don’t know, put on shoes. It was crazy. We drove for 15 minutes.

Martha Beck:
Insanity.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah. And so, it was perfectly nice for the 45 minutes that we were there eating dinner. And then we got there very early. So we got out there very early and before we knew it, we were back home. To my horror, the babysitter had successfully put Lila to bed. The job that clearly I am the only person in the world who she trusts to fall asleep.

Martha Beck:
And we want it to be that way always. Not.

Rowan Mangan:
She had just happily gone off to sleep. And I had thought that with the early dinner and the rushing home that I would be able to just do that last little bit of goodnight. I missed my baby. But no, she didn’t care. She was fast asleep. And then you told me… You said, “It’s okay, she’ll sleep through it. You just go in and you can just commune with her for a little while, while she’s asleep.” And I was like, “You don’t think I’ll”…

Martha Beck:
Because you always sit by her low bed and stroke her hair and everything. And it’s nurturing both ways when you’ve let me do it once. It nurtures the adult as well as the baby is my point.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah. Yeah. So, Karen was terrified she would wake up because we wanted to watch our TV show and you told me-

Martha Beck:
Oh, the excitement about our lives.

Rowan Mangan:
I know, right? And it was Karen’s birthday, but you overruled her. Said, “Go in for five minutes, it’ll be fine.”

So I went sneaking in into the sleeping child’s bedroom with my little hands in front of me the way you do when you’re sneaking. I don’t know if that-

Martha Beck:
What a giveaway. You would not make a good pick-pocket my love.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah, that’s true.

Martha Beck:
Hands are going… Nobody will notice that.

Rowan Mangan:
And I can’t do it without actually making that sound effect as well. But somehow the baby didn’t wake up even though I was doing that. And I sat down in the dark next to her bed and I could hear her little breathing. It was so nice. And I just started to stroke her hair. And you were right Marty. I mean, it was very soothing for… Well, for both of us. I assume for both of us.

I did start to calm down. She’s alive. She’s fine. After a few minutes though, I’m sort of thinking, “What did we give her for dinner tonight?” Because her hair feels like it has kind of… I don’t know. See, she sometimes put some dinner in her hair. No worries. I was like, “It’s a bit sticky and sort of coarse. What would make her hair go coarse from dinner?” And I’m like, “No, no, it mustn’t… I don’t know. It’s nothing.” Keep stroking. Keep stroking. And then finally I was like, what is that hard bit on her head? And it was horrifying. I couldn’t figure out what was going on. And so I look over and Marty on her head is a little plastic eye.

Martha Beck:
No.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah. Looking up at me. And I suddenly thought, “Oh my God, my baby is gone.”

Martha Beck:
It’s the stuff of horror films that is.

Rowan Mangan:
I had been stroking a monkey. Not a real monkey. That would be our daughter. I had been stroking a stuffed monkey for five minutes at that point. Just stroking gently, lovingly stroking Joshua’s-

Martha Beck:
Stuffed monkey. A memoir.

Rowan Mangan:
That sounds so wrong.

Martha Beck:
I know.

Rowan Mangan:
It doesn’t sound like what it is meant to sound like.

Martha Beck:
Stroking the stuffed monkey – a porno.

Rowan Mangan:
So Lila was there. She was buried deep under the covers and I was there with the monkey worrying that the goblin king had taken her. But no, it was fine. It was fine. And it just goes to show that you don’t need to go to the trouble of making a baby. You can just get a toy and stroke it and get the whole benefit really. I don’t know. Anyway, look, what are you trying to figure out, Marty?

Martha Beck:
You seemed so much happier after that incident.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah, well…

Martha Beck:
And mine is similar in a weird way.

Rowan Mangan:
Is that right?

Martha Beck:
Yeah. You know how there are skills that you don’t know you’ll need and then you get… Like making a fire with two sticks or whatever and you’re in a situation when you need to do it and then you wish you had practiced?

Rowan Mangan:
Like a survival situation?

Martha Beck:
Yeah. And there’s a skill that I feel that I’m starting to see is going to be part of my life and I have not given it enough time and that skill is shaving animals.

Rowan Mangan:
Shaving animals?

Martha Beck:
Shaving animals, yes.

Rowan Mangan:
Consensually?

Just as a surprise-

Martha Beck:
No. Hold them down.

Rowan Mangan:
… [inaudible 00:07:39].

Martha Beck:
Jump them in the woods, hold them down and shave them.

Rowan Mangan:
Wow. We had-

Martha Beck:
It’s good for them. Global warming. They need to be cooler. So this is because our dog, Claire, damaged her knee and got a knee brace. But Claire, Claire bear fair of hair and a lot of hair. I mean, there is a lot of hair on a golden retriever and she’s a bushy golden retriever. So our beloved Karrie-kpp has been trying to trim the hair on her legs with some scissors, which is-

Rowan Mangan:
Because it gets caught in the brace and-

Martha Beck:
Yes.

Rowan Mangan:
… It’s a very messy operation.

Martha Beck:
Yes. And so she said, “Marty, could you send away for the kit you used to shave the horse?” And I did go pale because the shaving of that horse really, really stays in my memory. So we were living in California and we had a place to put horses. We didn’t have our own horses, but our wonderful neighbors around us had tons of horses and they gave us some horses that were kind of geriatric.

And we were like, “Why are they being so generous?” And then we realized that horses eat money and poop money out the back and nobody wants to do away with a beloved horse. So we were kind of the old folks home for horses for a while. And there was a horse called Buddy. Oh, what a wonderful animal. Such a sweet horse. And he had something called Cushing Syndrome, which causes the horse’s hair to grow bushy and curly. Imagine a really furry horse, a horse that is furrier than anything you could imagine.

Rowan Mangan:
Oh, Buddy.

Martha Beck:
Oh, Buddy. He was so sweet. And it came to be summer and it was hot. And I saw-

Rowan Mangan:
It sort of looked a little bit like Slash from Guns N Roses if you have that visual.

Martha Beck:
I got nothing.

Rowan Mangan:
She hasn’t got it. That’s all right.

Martha Beck:
Give me something from has Mormonism and I’ll know. Is there no bushy horse symbolism in Mormonism?

Rowan Mangan:
I don’t know.

Martha Beck:
There probably is. I’ll hear from listeners. So anyway, I got this shaving kit through the mail to shave your horse. I saw that the other people were shaving their horses mid-drifts to keep them cooler.

Rowan Mangan:
So you went to www.ShaveYourHorse.com?

Martha Beck:
Yes, I did. And I got these clippers and I went out and I put Buddy in the place where you put them.

Rowan Mangan:
I see.

Martha Beck:
No, it’s just a place in a barn where there’s a little rope on each side and you clip their little bridal to the two ropes and they get to stand there and be groomed. If you’re gentle and caressing, they learn to love it. So Buddy was just fine. And I turned on my clippers and I began to shave.

Rowan Mangan:
Was it a little bit like the soothing feeling of stroking a stuffed monkey?

Martha Beck:
Not at all.

Rowan Mangan:
Really? How so? How not?

Martha Beck:
It was trying to use a weed whacker in a forest; a really thick jungle. It was like the clippers were going “zzzz” and Buddy was so hairy and I kept shaving and shaving. Now there was no way to hurt him because the clippers won’t let you hurt him. But I was shaving away and shaving away.

I had a huge garbage can there for the hair. Buddy filled that up. Buddy’s hair filled that up in seconds and I had to go dump it and bring it back and fill it up again and fill it up again. For the first time I realized why people could make horse hair beds in the olden times.

Rowan Mangan:
Oh, right. Yeah.

Martha Beck:
Because you could have made several beds from one horse here. And I shaved-

Rowan Mangan:
Buddy beds.

Martha Beck:
I shaved and I shaved. I mean, for hours I shaved poor Buddy. And then it was time, he really, really had to go out and be outstanding in his field as horses like to be. And so I had to unhook him and lead him out to pasture. And there was a guy there to fix something for us. And he looked up, this repairman, at the horse as I went by and he said, “Whoa.” And then he said, “I guess that’s a work-in-progress.”

Rowan Mangan:
What had you done, Marty?

Martha Beck:
Picture if you will, a three-year-old being told at nursery school we’re going to draw a horse. We’re going to make a picture of a horse for your family to put on the fridge along with the other 50,000 things that they have put on the fridge. And you’re going to make this horse out of… I don’t know, stuff you would find in a dry creek bed like leaves and all the other stuff too. Macaroni and piles of mud. And the kid just puts glue on the page and just stuffs together everything there is to make a horse. That’s what Buddy was like.

Rowan Mangan:
I’m so lost with the macaroni and the dry creek bed, but I’m just going to go with you with this because [inaudible 00:12:36]-

Martha Beck:
Just trust me. Buddy looked like something made from a lot of bad things.

Rowan Mangan:
Oh, I believe you.

Martha Beck:
You have a big general shape of a horse. And he was so patient about it. And so every day I would go out and shave him some more.

Rowan Mangan:
Eventually, he died of shame.

Martha Beck:
He died of shave. That’s funny. He died of both. No, he’s not dead. Yes, he is. But really in a way that is gentle and good and fear not gentle listeners, but he had a happy life and a great easy death. And I’m sure he is running around horse heaven and he’s all shaven there. God shaves him the right way. Anyway, I did get him down to skin level. I really got Buddy shaved, but it took me a month.

Rowan Mangan:
Wow.

Martha Beck:
And now I’m having to shave Claire and I’m not any better at it. Not one bit better. And I’m like, “Why did I not stop and say this incident is clearly sent to me by the universe to say it’s time to up your animal shaving game. It’s a thing you’ll have to do.”

Rowan Mangan:
Far be it from me and all that, but I feel like this may not be about your skill level, it just may be about that this is never supposed to happen in the real world. I don’t know.

Martha Beck:
That is an alternate explanation, isn’t it?

Rowan Mangan:
I don’t know. Well, good luck with trying to figure out your animal shaving woes.

Martha Beck:
Yes. And the little piles of hair you’re finding all over the house. That’s me shedding as I’m trying to shave Claire.

Rowan Mangan:
Oh my God! Oh, our dust buster will never be the same.

Martha Beck:
There are so many things to figure out and you just don’t see them all coming do you?

Rowan Mangan:
I certainly didn’t see that coming.

Martha Beck:
You’re stroking a monkey. You’re shaving a horse. Basically, any [inaudible 00:14:29] of any animal.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah.

Martha Beck:
That’s what you’re going to have to figure out.

Rowan Mangan:
That’s true. We’ll be right back with more Bewildered.

I have a favor to ask. You might not know this, but ratings and reviews are like gold in the podcasting universe. They get podcasts in front of more faces, more eyes, more ears. All the bits that you could have a podcast in front of, that’s what they do. So it would help us enormously if you would consider going over to your favorite podcasting app, especially if it’s Apple and giving us a few stars, maybe even a five, maybe even a six if you can find a way to hack the system I wouldn’t complain. A review would be also be wonderful. We read them all and love them. So thank you very much in advance. Let’s just go out there and bewilder the world.

So hey, why don’t we move along to today’s topic?

Martha Beck:
Please God, let’s. Yeah, and isn’t it a BeWild Files again?

Rowan Mangan:
It is. It is. We’ve been loving doing some BeWild Files lately, frankly, because we find you all more interesting than us and you can see why we’re just obsessed with animal hair in various forms. So if you want to send in a question or a revelation of what you’re trying to figure out for a BeWild files episode, go to rowan mangan.com/bewildered and there you will find detailed instructions on how to do it. And today we are hearing from Kathryn who has a question about balance.

Kathryn:
Hi Martha and Rowan. I absolutely love the Bewildered podcast. Thank you for considering my question. I’m wondering about balanced living. I tend to live in the extremes. For example, with healthy eating, I’ll eat healthy for a week, eat really unhealthy for a week and continue to flip back and forth.

This comes up in multiple areas in my life, such as getting enough sleep, working out, working on the company I’m starting, et cetera. My question is, how does one live a balanced life day-to-day as opposed to averaging out to a balanced life by constantly living in the extremes? Thank you.

Martha Beck:
What a fabulous –

Rowan Mangan:
Thanks Kathryn.

Martha Beck:
Kathryn is wonderful. Hello Kathryn. Thank you so much for this question and it’s kind of a… There is a lot in there. Let’s unpack it just a little bit here.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah. So I think I’m guessing that what Kathryn is getting at is that she feels like there’s a problem in these extremes that she’s talking about. As she puts it, the flipping back and forth, even though from what she’s saying it does average out okay.

Martha Beck:
Yeah, I think a lot of people struggle with this. I mean, as a coach, when I was coaching a lot, this was continuously… Somebody always had this issue. I’m not being consistent enough. I need to stop doing extreme things and just be completely regular and consistent. There was just this underlying assumption that total consistency is the way to go. Yeah.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah. And I think that it’s not that surprising that we get this kind of messaging because I think it’s there in the culture, right? Well, what would you say the culture says about this topic?

Martha Beck:
Oh my gosh. We always end up coming back to the whole factory thing. But it’s not just the factory idea, it’s the whole mechanistic, materialistic, productivity-obsessed culture. Things are supposed to be driven regularly on a daily or weekly basis. It’s very much according to the calendar, which if you think about it, it’s kind of odd. Why should you have to do something every single day the same amount? In a factory that’s how you maximize productivity. So we try again to mimic factories.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah. It’s like the productivity culture is such a powerful force, right?

Martha Beck:
Yeah.

Rowan Mangan:
Everything has to be perfectly measured out. This many hours of sleep. And you’ve got all your apps, by the way to check this now. This many hours of sleep, this many hours of exercise, meditation, socializing, protein, carbs, fat, recommended daily doses of everything.

Martha Beck:
Eight glasses of water, which someone just made up by the way. There’s no science behind that. But just everybody [inaudible 00:18:56] eight glasses of water, no more, no less.

Rowan Mangan:
Sounds very smart though when you think about it. Eight glasses. Definitely.

Martha Beck:
And I think the idea is that this maxes out your performance in some way. If you do something every day, you can master skills like shaving a horse. You can acquire. You can do it. The fact that it’s happening regularly means that you’re going to get more and more and more and better and better and better.

And if the productivity drops off, everybody panics. This isn’t going to be great. So yeah, it’s really… I don’t think anybody can do this, but we all end up thinking we should. Yeah.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah. It’s funny, isn’t it? I have this image in my head around this stuff that’s like the person who gets up at 5:00 AM off to the gym before work, quick shower, and they’ve always got… I always wonder how they carry all this stuff. And they are probably cycling to work, got all their gear, got their salad for lunch at your desk, quick drink with a friend after work, home to cook a chicken stir-fry.

Martha Beck:
Oh, very healthy. Lots-

Rowan Mangan:
Of veggies-

Martha Beck:
… Of veggies.

Rowan Mangan:
… That you got at the farmer’s market on the weekend.

Martha Beck:
There for your kids. There for your partner. Always cool and collected and producing goodness in every moment. Yeah.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah. Equal measure every day.

Martha Beck:
Yeah. And I’ve heard you do this so many times. You will knock out some amazing bit of writing on your novel or you’ll do something phenomenally great for…

Rowan Mangan:
Joshua, the monkey.

Martha Beck:
For Joshua, the monkey.

Rowan Mangan:
Gave him the best head massage of his life.

Martha Beck:
Or everything will be… You’ll go through a phase of decorating things. You’ll redo your room and it looks amazing. And you get all these arty things and you’ve created all this beauty. And then just as you’re about to rejoice, you’re like, “Oh my God, I haven’t been cooking enough. Oh my God, I haven’t been taking Lila to the park enough. I haven’t… Oh my God, I haven’t been doing something enough.”

And there’s always something that you’ve let go. And I’m like, “Dude, you’re operating 24/7. How could you not let go?” Yeah. You do this a lot.

Rowan Mangan:
You have been a bit like that recently with your painting. I think you’ve been going through a bit of a phase.

Martha Beck:
Yeah, that’s very different. My whole premise… Okay. All this mechanistic time-measured equalized stuff is very left hemisphere if you’re talking about the brain. And yes, I know it’s a generality, but it’s a generality that works, yeah? So I decided I was going to let the other side of my brain take over for a month and just see what would happen if I let myself go.

And what happened is a time of incredibly extreme focus on just a few things. I have always loved to paint and draw, and I’ve always tried to do a little bit every day and there’s no reason for it. I’m not a professional artist. See there, the culture comes in. You’re not a professional artist. You shouldn’t be painting every day. You should only do that on the rare days when you’ve taken a vacation or somehow-

Rowan Mangan:
When you’ve finished all your real work.

Martha Beck:
That’s right. In all the oceans of free time you have after you’ve been performing regularly at all these other things. So what happened when I let myself was that I went into a period where I can’t even talk about it very well because I wasn’t in my verbal brain. I became a massive set of eyes. I just was absolutely riveted by the process of painting and by getting my body to do it. And something called deep practice where you look at somebody who’s really good at something, which now I can do online, right?

Watch these supernaturally talented painters. And then I would be so obsessed with trying to create that. And it wasn’t like, “I have to get this done.” It was just wow. And I ended up getting up at 4:00 in the morning and working all day and people would talk to me and I would just look at them blankly as if I didn’t speak English because at the moment I didn’t. And I learned so freaking much. My art was on steroids. I learned so much, but it looked really, really extreme and I’m not sure what to do about it.

Rowan Mangan:
I think that this is a very convenient story in that, “Oh, the hypothesis, I’m going to test it all the [inaudible 00:23:45] this brain and not the verbal brain and let’s see what happens.”

What I saw from my side of the fence was you got obsessed.

Martha Beck:
I was obsessed. That’s fair.

Rowan Mangan:
And you completely disappeared into your art world, sucking away on your paintbrush as you do, as you’re teaching our daughter to do.

Martha Beck:
I thought you were saying that I sucked as an artist, but you literally mean I put my paintbrush in my mouth.

Rowan Mangan:
You put your paintbrush in your mouth. No one knows why.

Martha Beck:
I touch it to my lips.

Rowan Mangan:
I’m not interested in why you suck on your paintbrush.

Martha Beck:
Tap it to my lip.

Rowan Mangan:
But you’re very good at painting. You don’t suck at all in that department. But yeah, it’s an obsession and it’s very convenient for you to have this beautiful story about the experiment and everything. But what I saw was you getting sucked. It’s all about sucking, and yet you don’t suck as an artist. It’s amazing.

Martha Beck:
Thank you.

Rowan Mangan:
Getting sucked into an absolute need that I don’t think is as easily explained by the mind as, “I was conducting an experiment.” I think that’s actual bullshit.

Martha Beck:
You know what that is? It’s-

Rowan Mangan:
I think that’s something you’ve built retrospectively afterward to justify it.

Martha Beck:
In my defense, I constructed it prior to the event, but you’re absolutely right. It’s a cultural cover story. Yeah. It’s a way to say it’s okay to paint for a while because I have this thing about brain hemispheres that I need to prove for the book I’m writing. My publisher, rah rah rah rah rah, my agent rah rah.

And really I think my soul was starved because that’s what it was like. It was like being at a buffet table when I had been absolutely starved and I could not satisfy the appetite for painting until… It ended up being more like six weeks. And now I’m trying to taper off.

Rowan Mangan:
Well, but it’s interesting because it’s such a great example because to me painting is not something that really fits our… Start it, finish up work by 4:45 and then you can paint till 5:30. It’s not really that sort of thing. And I just wonder how could that have served you?

You were talking about how much you learned. How could it have served you to do this 40 minutes a day or 35 minutes a day after you did the gym and the stir-fry? It doesn’t make sense to me. And so I’m sort of… To think about Kathryn’s question again. It’s like apples and oranges in a way, I think, with a lot of our lives. And painting is a great example because it’s more obviously not something that fits the mechanistic, but when she’s talking about food, if you eat well one week to the next, it’s not as clear that it should be as animal, as physical, as nature, as what your painting is. I mean, I just get enthusiasms and they can last from half an hour to six months, sometimes longer.

Martha Beck:
Like what? Give us some examples.

Rowan Mangan:
Mountain gorillas.

Martha Beck:
Oh, I did not know about this.

Rowan Mangan:
When I first saw Gorillas In The Mist, I think I looking back it probably had something to do with Sigourney Weaver. Maybe that’s what it was all about. Started doing my hair like Diane Fosse and was completely obsessed.

Martha Beck:
I started doing my hair like a mountain gorilla. Go on. And then you could come in and stroke it. Sorry.

Rowan Mangan:
So many directions I could go with that. Yeah. Or I have periods of time that is months where I’m getting up and writing early in the morning and then I just can’t. I think over time I’ve kind of made peace with me being that way. But as you were saying I do still fall into the, “Oh, I should be cooking more. Why aren’t I cooking more?”

Martha Beck:
You said this-

Rowan Mangan:
Even though cooking is an enthusiasm that comes and goes in my life.

Martha Beck:
You said this just the other day. You said, “Marty, I wish I could be a consistent person.”

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah.

Martha Beck:
You said that and I was like, “Oh yeah, I really understand because it would make your life so much easier.” But mainly the difficulty comes from how much you blame yourself for not doing everything consistently and for having these enthusiasms that sweep you away. You know?

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah, yeah. It’s funny, isn’t it? I mean, I think we’re always flicking in and out of different ego states and there is a part of me that is like… And actually, since having Lila and being a mother as one of the many things that I’m trying to be, it has actually been beating a lot of the self-recrimination out of me on the whole because I think it has to do with never having had enough sleep. I can let myself off the hook a lot more because it’s just clearly everything is extreme. Everything is extreme now. So consistency is a pipe drain.

Martha Beck:
It is. I’m glad you can forgive yourself because there are a lot of people-

Rowan Mangan:
Sometimes.

Martha Beck:
… Who can’t. A lot of people add a child to the mix and their life becomes overwhelming and they just become more angry at themselves and more self-blaming and they try harder and it doesn’t work. And then the kid is caught in that mix of anxiety as well.

Rowan Mangan:
I think even the part of you that can forgive yourself and the part of you that judges yourself, I think we even flick between those identities.

Martha Beck:
Oh, that is such a good point. Yeah.

Rowan Mangan:
There is no consistency. There is no consistency.

Martha Beck:
There is no such thing as consistency in the world, Sue. Figure it out.

Rowan Mangan:
How do we figure it out, Marty?

Martha Beck:
Well, I have it completely figured out and I’ll tell you all about it. I don’t have it figured out, but I’ll tell you what I do think in a minute.

Rowan Mangan:
So how do we figure it out?

Martha Beck:
The problem of extremes and how to balance them. Well, the first thing that I thought when we took this question on board was that nature does not calculate balance that way. What happens every day? Is it the same all the time? Yeah, it doesn’t do that.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah. I mean, the obvious thing is the seasons, right? If everything was balanced and consistent, every deciduous tree would have a third of its leaves on it at any given time, right?

Martha Beck:
Something like that. A quarter? A quarter of its leaves on in each season.

Rowan Mangan:
See, I’m in a very natural space and I don’t calculate that sort of thing. And when I’m here, “Hey, you can be in your culture with your fractions,” and whatever, not me. I’m just like some. Nature has some.

Martha Beck:
The math of nature is chaos actually. And so there’s no such thing. And chaos creates beautiful pattern disorder. But there’s no such thing as an average snowflake. There’s no such thing as an average raindrop. There’s no such thing as an average tree.

There are no average times in our life. What is your average sleep? What’s your average sleep? You don’t even know.

I just read a thing that said people used to sleep twice every night and get up for a while in the middle of the night and it went on for thousands of years and then we just stopped.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah. We got distracted by sleep. Happens to me every day.

Martha Beck:
Regularity is not the norm in nature is the point.

Rowan Mangan:
I saw this great tweet recently and then I couldn’t find it again to cite it properly, so apologies for that. But someone was saying, “It’s winter and I’m a mammal, so why am I being expected to produce at a level of summer? In the winter, I’m supposed to be hibernating right now or at least very low activity.” But in the culture, there is no winter or summer. It doesn’t exist. Same every day. Same every day. It’s always the factory and the conveyor belt.

Martha Beck:
Yeah. And in nature it’s the flow. It’s the big and then the little and it’s the intense and the extreme. And then there are times when everything goes along, but not very often does it regulate. I remember when we were in California again, there was a bad drought.

Rowan Mangan:
How was Buddy? Was he okay?

Martha Beck:
Buddy-

Rowan Mangan:
How was…

Martha Beck:
Half shaven. Not good.

Rowan Mangan:
Half a perm.

Martha Beck:
Deep shave. Deep shave.

Rowan Mangan:
Perm on the left, shaved on the right.

Martha Beck:
That’s how I do my hair now. But we had a drought because it’s a drought biome. Even though there is human-caused climate change, there has always been a tendency for drought in California. And then the drought ended. We had a rainy year and the year after that, every year they have what’s called the acorn rain. We lived in an oak forest. So 20 species of oak were mostly the vegetation.

And there’s this time when they all dropped their acorns at about the same time. So I was used to that. But the year after the drought, the acorn production went bananas to blend some metaphors. There were millions upon millions upon millions of acorns. They were everywhere. They literally carpeted the ground everywhere and each-

Rowan Mangan:
Remember the feeling of when they were all falling on the roof and you used to call it the acorn rain? It would just-

Martha Beck:
Yeah.

Rowan Mangan:
A wind would blow through the trees and it was just…

Martha Beck:
Yeah, it was like cannon fire as well. But there were so freaking many. And then the animals had their babies and they all had more. The little wild turkeys would go by and they’d have like 25 chicks a piece. After a drought-

Rowan Mangan:
Poor bastards.

Martha Beck:
Well, they get… In their defense, the chicks break out of the eggs, they go around pecking, all as well. I hope.

Rowan Mangan:
You don’t know what those mothers go through.

Martha Beck:
I don’t know. I don’t know because-

Rowan Mangan:
You might think they taking care of their 25 baby turkeys, but one of them is actually just a toy turkey.

Martha Beck:
And if I had been a better person Ro, I would’ve shaven each and every one of those little wild turkeys just to help out the moms.

Rowan Mangan:
Or at least give them a hug. You don’t have to shave everything all the time, but whatever.

Martha Beck:
Would have been good. And then I-

Rowan Mangan:
You have your own ways of expressing affection.

Martha Beck:
If I really love you, I’ll shave you.

Rowan Mangan:
That’s how I ended up with this haircut.

Martha Beck:
The gracious badger haircut we call it. But I thought about it and I read and learned that after drought, nature goes nuts and creates massive levels of life. It produces more life when the water comes back. And it was an example of how something has survived millions and millions of years in going to really intense extremes. I remember thinking as I looked at all these acorns, each of which by the way has the material in it to create a whole nother oak forest. The creative capacity of that acorn rain is not conceivable. So I thought this is what giving birth, creating life, and continuing life is a very extreme experience.

When I had my first child, I was supposed to go… Two stories. I was supposed to go to lunch with someone and I called her and said, “I can’t go to lunch. I’m in labor.” And she’s like, “Well, doesn’t it last a long time? Go to lunch and then have your baby.” And prior to that, I had said to a student in a class where I was a teaching fellow, “I’m having a baby in February, so I won’t be here next semester.” And he said, “That’s one day.” Oh, I hope he was left alone with babies at some point when he was-

Rowan Mangan:
25 wild turkeys and I don’t mean drinks.

Martha Beck:
Because the culture says, “Squirt the baby out in the field and keep on working.” And nature says, “Oh my God”-

Rowan Mangan:
Ow.

Martha Beck:
Yeah. And the body says this is happening. This is the most important thing on our agenda right now. And I will not allow you to focus on anything else. No, no, no.

Rowan Mangan:
And it’s only when that’s not happening in your body that you can say…

Martha Beck:
Yeah.

Rowan Mangan:
Come to lunch first. Because there is your brain stepping in as the mouthpiece of culture. That’s crazy. You’re not actually going to be squeezing a human out of your vagina at 12:30, are you? Come on.

Martha Beck:
We’ll get you a very soft chair.

Rowan Mangan:
[inaudible 00:37:05].

Martha Beck:
And I thought actually Kathryn’s question is pointing us back to the rhythm of nature, which is to go to extremes in certain rhythms like rhythm… It is syncopated rhythms and rhythms that shift and move and speed up and slow down. So instead of looking at the calendar, you’re… Ooh, it’s happening in your body. But what you just said is when that’s not in your body, you can ignore it. But we’re always in our bodies. So giving birth is an extreme case, but if the body is always sending those rhythms to us saying-

Rowan Mangan:
[inaudible 00:37:48].

Martha Beck:
Yeah.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah. And I think also in a more prosaic, everyday kind of way, all our rhythms are different in terms of what we’re going to need. I mean, there are things like winters and sometimes you have a body in your body and things like that. But in terms of what you eat and when and that sort of thing, it’s different.

Martha Beck:
Yeah. I figured out what works for me with exercise a long time ago. Work out really hard one day rest for two to three days completely, then work out really hard again.

Rowan Mangan:
But what you should be doing is every single day. Every single day.

Martha Beck:
And people would tell me that and I’d read it and a trainer at the gym would tell me that. And I would get so ashamed that I would start working out every single day and every single time I injured myself. And so I have this secret that it takes me three days to recover from a workout. I feel shy and ashamed admitting that in public, but why? It worked.

Rowan Mangan:
That’s hilarious because I just don’t do that at all. I oddly don’t feel enough shame, if anything about it. To come back to Kathryn is the thing… We always say the same thing, it doesn’t really matter. Is it your brain often being the culture’s ally and our own worst enemy? Is your brain saying that you have to do this all the time? Or is it your body, your animal, your heart, your soul?

Martha Beck:
Even your soul, yeah. So what’s a wilder way to do this if we were to give Kathryn a takeaway?

Rowan Mangan:
So because she mentioned food, it occurred to me that the idea of appetite is kind of an interesting one for this as a way of conceptualizing in our brains the way that our bodies want different things at different times. Your appetite for painting just exploded. And-

Martha Beck:
Yeah, and after six weeks it said I’m full. And it was the weirdest sensation, but it was full. It didn’t need to constantly paint.

Rowan Mangan:
And there’s a wisdom to our appetites that is so deep and old and very, very wise that… A wise wisdom that our brains can’t fathom. Your brain can’t fathom that you’re eating more right now because you’re going to go into a cave and hibernate in a little while.

Martha Beck:
Is that what you’re planning to do?

Rowan Mangan:
Just me and the monkey.

Martha Beck:
I’ll support you. I’ll support you, my dear.

Rowan Mangan:
Try not to shave me again before we go.

I need all my fur for the winter. So if we want to paint, we want to read paperback novels all night and our brains won’t understand that wisdom. But if we can trust it because… And Kathryn even said it does actually even out. That’s the interesting thing is it’s like at a certain point this appetite is sated and another appetite steps in.

Martha Beck:
Huh, interesting.

Rowan Mangan:
Almost as though it knows what it’s doing.

Martha Beck:
Ooh, never. So get rid of that cultural model of having to do everything regularly. Really go to extremes sometimes, or stay mild sometimes, but always 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.

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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.