Rowan Mangan:
And I’m Rowan Mangan. This is another episode of Bewildered, the podcast for people trying to figure it out. How are you doing, Marty?

Martha Beck:
I’m doing all right. I’m coming to terms with the fact that I have cited before that our child appears to have had a Greek God as a sperm donor.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah, that’s fair.

Martha Beck:
Yeah. The other day I put her down for her nap and she was so sweet and we’d taken almost everything out of the room so that she could not climb upon it and dismantle furniture. She was so sweet and loving. I said, “Now go to sleep, honey. I love you.” She said, “I love you too.” Then she said, “Don’t take that box.” Sure enough, she used a diaper box to just perform diabolical feats of destruction.

Rowan Mangan:
I sent you guys a text at one point that just said, “It’s like a crow. It can use tools.”

Martha Beck:
How are you given all that?

Rowan Mangan:
Oh, gosh. It’s fun. It’s all right. It’s equal parts, diabolical and heavenly.

Martha Beck:
It is, really. Well, that’s the other part of having a demigod.

Rowan Mangan:
Well, quite, yeah. Yeah. Quite.

Martha Beck:
Destructive but delightful.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah. So what are you trying to figure out?

Martha Beck:
I’m trying to figure out, it happened at dinner yesterday, and it happens at dinner many days. Why the three of us, you, Karen, and myself, cannot stop completing each other’s sentences incorrectly. Actually, you don’t do it, Karen and I do it. So Rose-

Rowan Mangan:
Glad I didn’t have to be the one to point that out.

Martha Beck:
Well, see, I’ve finished that sentence for you. So Rowe will say, “I really hate it when people give you …” Karen and I are like, “Yeah, a blank look. No, a pickle. No, a homeless hamster. No, that is not what I’m talking about.” Then she’ll go, “Ah.” So anyway, and I was thinking about how hard it is too, and Karen’s like, “Body check another shopper in the aisles. I know.” I’m like, “Cry on cue. I totally get it. Get rid of ground hornets, whatever. It’s never what you’re thinking about. Not even remotely.

Rowan Mangan:
No. It’s a fascinating glimpse into your various psychologies though, because I’m just always like, why are you trying to finish that sentence? What scares you about me taking a moment, but then just the, “Really, you thought that was where I was going up to all these years? You thought I was going to the Hornets?” No. Maybe it’s an American thing.

Martha Beck:
Yeah.

Rowan Mangan:
I’d be willing to bet.

Martha Beck:
We could put out a slogan. Americans finishing other country’s sentences for two and a half centuries.

Rowan Mangan:
There you go.

Martha Beck:
Yeah.

Rowan Mangan:
That’ll work.

Martha Beck:
So anyway, seriously, deeply. What are you trying to figure out?

Rowan Mangan:
What am I trying to figure out? It’s Lila related, because it always is these days because that’s the only thing that’s happening in my life. I think this is one of those from the mouths of babes kind of stories. But she naps at school and sometimes she does, sometimes she doesn’t actually, her poor teachers. So one day I went to pick her up from school and the teacher told me this story about during her nap. So they have to put our child in a special room-

Martha Beck:
Oh my God.

Rowan Mangan:
… to nap in a hallway. Because otherwise she gets too excited to settle down. She starts naming all the other children out loud. I don’t know. I’m sure it’s fine.

Martha Beck:
I’m sure she’s fine.

Rowan Mangan:
Anyway, so they put her in her special little dark place, and one of the teachers has to stay in there with her. I mean, really, we do have a problem child. God love her. And she’s there and she’s asleep. She’s finally fallen asleep, but she’s managed to get herself tangled up in her own blanket. And Ms. Lindsay says, so all of a sudden she starts tugging on the blanket that’s become entangled around her legs and becomes furious without waking up, and she starts yelling, “I was using that,” to herself in her sleep.

Martha Beck:
In her sleep.

Rowan Mangan:
Like, “Who is trying to take this from me? I was using this, child of a God.” And I was driving home thinking, is that a metaphor for everything that it is to, I don’t know, to be human? Or is it a metaphor for culture like that you’ve already got it, but you’re so angry about it being taken away? Or is it the insatiability of the human ego or something?

Martha Beck:
Yeah, it’s like that.

Rowan Mangan:
Why do we think everyone’s trying to screw us?

Martha Beck:
Oh, I thought that was just common knowledge. I have to say though, I think she gets the blanket untangling thing from you, not from Zeus.

Rowan Mangan:
How dare you.

Martha Beck:
Because I will tell the peeps right now.

Rowan Mangan:
About the burrito?

Martha Beck:
Yes. When Rowe goes to sleep, she begins as if conscious to collect the blankets around her into a nice little packet so that she can roll over and roll over and make a Rowe Burrito out of the blankets no matter who’s trying to share them. So I think this one just comes legit through you.

Rowan Mangan:
I love that about myself, even though I’m not awake when it happens because it seems so cozy for me. I’m really happy for my sleeping self that I’m all burritoed up less, so less good for you, I guess.

Martha Beck:
It’s charming.

Rowan Mangan:
But you know what it reminds me of Marty?

Martha Beck:
What?

Rowan Mangan:
You know that feeling of just being encased in a small, warm, cozy space where nothing’s going to hurt you?

Martha Beck:
[inaudible 00:06:48] Tortilla. Yeah.

Rowan Mangan:
Yep. Reminds me a little bit.

Martha Beck:
Yes.

Rowan Mangan:
#Van life.

Martha Beck:
Oh, damn.

Rowan Mangan:
In your little van, all snuggled up.

Martha Beck:
[inaudible 00:07:00] Is like a burrito.

Rowan Mangan:
I said to Rowe the other day, “I don’t love travel as much as you do. I just want to be hunkered in a small space that’s familiar.” And she said, “Van,” and I was like, “A van travels.”

Martha Beck:
That’s right.

Rowan Mangan:
Isn’t that the genius of it. It’s both. You’re at home while you’re traveling.

Martha Beck:
No, it doesn’t work that way for the rest of us. It’s just hashtag van people.

Rowan Mangan:
But I don’t expect that about you.

Martha Beck:
You’re not invited in there anyway.

Rowan Mangan:
I just see you rolling through life, wrapped in a burrito, wrapped inside a van, wrapped inside the garage of our house. Just layers upon layers upon layers of Rowe. Oh, very sweet.

Martha Beck:
Yeah, it’ll do. 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 five, maybe even six. If you can find a way to hack the system, I wouldn’t complain. And 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.

Martha Beck:
So what is our topic for this day? Because I know we have a Bewild files up for us.

Rowan Mangan:
We do. We have a Bewild files, which frequent listeners will know is the kind of bewildered episode where we hear what listeners just like you are trying to figure out. And if you want to know how to do this, you can go to rowanmangan.com/bewildered. I have written out some very complicated… No, the process may be complicated, the instructions are very clear. The bit long.

Martha Beck:
Do you remember the time you tried to explain to Adam that winter was coming and you’re like, “The days will grow shorter. There will be more moisture and cold in the air. It’s okay, we can add different blankets and there’s always the possibility of a van.” And he was like, “What?” And I said, “It’s getting cold, but it’s okay.”

Rowan Mangan:
Oh dear.

Martha Beck:
You’re so wonderful to give the people such detailed instructions.

Rowan Mangan:
Thank you. I do try. And today we have a wonderful question from listener Laurel that we will now listen to.

Laurel:
Dear Martha and Row, I’m trying to figure out how to lean into a long creative project. In my case, finishing my first literary non-fiction book. I’m struggling to draw boundaries around this depth of focus in a world full of distractions. You speak a lot on the podcast about the kind of creativity that is light, fun, and non-goal oriented. But I’m interested in your perspective on ushering large, creative LifeWorks into the world. Those ones that are more like a marriage than a fling. How do you sustain the grit, the pitfalls, the mistakes, the breakthroughs and the thousands of hours of quality attention that this kind of magic making asks for, all without letting life get too serious?

Martha Beck:
Well, what an amazing topic. I know it lands with you. It certainly lands with me.

Rowan Mangan:
We basically just get excited when people say things and we’re like, “Right, I know right.”

Martha Beck:
People are out there figuring out what we want to hear, and then they send it as their question, and we are gratified. See, I’m paranoid, not paranoid. I think everybody’s out to help me. Anyway, we both have tons of experience with this issue and it’s so well put by Laurel.

Rowan Mangan:
What’s your vibe with this stuff, Marty?

Martha Beck:
There’s always books and articles. Books and articles have always been the core of my work and I’ve had to do it. I’ve had to keep writing long projects or doing the weekly column for Oprah Magazine. So it was regular.

Rowan Mangan:
Monthly, not weekly.

Martha Beck:
Yeah. Through hell and high water. And I have to say the same thing goes for this podcast, which I deeply love, but Mercury is always freaking retrograde.

Rowan Mangan:
Oh, right.

Martha Beck:
And we just have to keep [inaudible 00:11:33]. You got sick, we’re gone different continents, everything goes wrong and we have to keep plugging. Yeah.

Rowan Mangan:
It’s interesting because in a way, not to discount your wealth of experience, but it does strike me that the books and articles have real world deadlines. And I wonder if that’s a little bit different than having to make those kind of commitments and accessing that kind of creativity from a place where what you’re working on is something that no one is waiting for.

Martha Beck:
Oh my God.

Rowan Mangan:
We’re asking for, which is something that I relate to and yes, as you know, poor thing because you have to hear about it all the time. I’ve been going through quite a time of having to grow towards acceptance of the realities of having a toddler, just one. I know some people don’t stop at one, but if you are in their position of maybe not stopping at one, stop, just stop.

Martha Beck:
Just stop.

Rowan Mangan:
It’s a lot. One is a 100% more than zero. All right. And I love my daughter so much and I really couldn’t have known how different… On exactly what Laurel’s saying too, because the parenting piece, actually much like a lot of 9:00 to 5:00 work or paying bills kind of work, it’s kind of in that, here’s the problem, deal with it. Here’s the problem, deal with it. Boom, boom, put out a fire, boom, boom, turn on the light. And then what Laurel’s talking about is this is trying to access a state that is so different. And so it’s not just that you are having to move between states. Well, no, it’s not just that you’re trying to, you have to find the time to do it, but then you also have to move between these instant gratification state to this one, which is very different.

Martha Beck:
It requires intense focus over a pretty long period. And they’ve shown in studies that if a writer gets interrupted even very briefly, “Here, take this call. Okay, order different dog food.” That it takes 20 minutes to get back into the process. But I love the way you’ve adapted to this.

Rowan Mangan:
Well, yeah, I mean recently after just the push and the disappointment and the self-recrimination and all of that, and just going round and round that merry-go-round for a while, I really did get to a point with various writing projects where now I had to surrender, which is not what I’m telling you to do, Laurel. But I had this thing where I was like, I think I’ve reached the moment of surrender. And I’d been trying to do a rewrite to a deadline that was soft of my novel. And I thought, okay, this is the moment of surrender. And then I thought, hang on. But it’s just the surrender of the moment. So I inverted the expression in my head so that I was just saying, “I’m not surrendering the project and I’m not surrendering my commitment to it, but I am surrendering to this moment because it’s not going to happen in this moment.”

Martha Beck:
And that little couple at the moment of surrender is the surrender of the moment. I found that really, really helpful. Even retrospectively, going back and saying, yeah, all those moments, I was afraid because I’d surrendered. I would never go back to the project. I’d never complete it. No. It was the moment I was surrendering to. And I watched you do this the other day because Lila is choosing not to nap quite frequently at a particularly busy time in our lives. And you came in after trying for two hours to get her to stop dismantling furniture and she had taken the stuffing out of an easy chair and you came in and with wild eyes and you said, “If she doesn’t nap, we are so screwed.”

Rowan Mangan:
Except I didn’t say screwed. I said a different four letter word.

Martha Beck:
And then an hour later, ’cause I was on a phone call or something, I came out and you were completely serene. And you were like, “I’ve accepted. She’s going to stop napping. We just have to adapt.” I think in the olden days, it was harder for you to surrender a moment because you had so much less need to do it. When you’re not with a baby or a toddler, you are getting really, really good at surrendering the moment, in the moment when surrender is the only thing to do.

Rowan Mangan:
And I wonder how much of the ability to let go can come full circle to the ability to… What’s the opposite? Hold on.

Martha Beck:
Persist. No, hold on. But to be in the flow of that deep work, there’s a flow to it. And I think when you try to hang on too tight to the sides, it’ll just rip you apart. And when you surrender the moment, in the moment when surrender is the only thing to do, you don’t feel the river still flowing with you, but you’re free and it takes you.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah, that’s lovely. That’s beautiful. Well, we like to take a little glimpse into what the culture says about whatever topic we are talking about. So how would you characterize that in Laurel’s case?

Martha Beck:
Always go to what a robot or a factory would do, and you’ll get to what our culture says you should do. Every day should be the same. Have a good attitude, get up early, go for a run at 4:00 in the morning, then put in three hours before the kids are awake. You won’t even know you’ve done it and you’ll have your novel finished.

Rowan Mangan:
That’s funny how often, when the culture tells us how simple it is to just do things that there’s often an assumption of privilege that you can find underneath it, lurking there. And reminds me of a tweet that I saw recently. It was so good. It starts, just had a call with someone on the Forbes 30 under 30 list and came away really impressed. He shared with me how he made VP at a top tech company before age 30 and they’ve got a list. Number one, 4:30 AM wake up, number two, cold showers. Number three, gratitude journal. Number four, meditate. Number five, dad owns the tech company.

Rowan Mangan:
And it’s so funny because that’s what privilege is.

Martha Beck:
Yes.

Rowan Mangan:
Is thinking that all you need to do is-

Martha Beck:
The 4:30 AM.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah. And I think that there’s so much rah in the messaging, there’s always some subtext that’s about some sort of privilege that’s invisible.

Martha Beck:
I’ve read a few books like that recently. People send me books all the time. And so many of them are like, “It’s on a beautiful level playing field here and let’s just go out and you are exactly like me. And we’re going to have the same stresses and the same success because when the going gets tough, the tough get going. And it’s all the same for us.”

Rowan Mangan:
And if I’m most successful, it’s just that I work hard at times.

Martha Beck:
I just work harder. And I mean, I remember at Harvard people telling me that the day a woman has a baby, it’s just the same for the father and the mother. And I was like, “Is that really feminism? Because that’s what they said it was.” So below that cheerful, chipper playing field that looks so level, it’s like the pyramid of capitalism and patriarchy and all the isms. That pyramid is poking up through the center of the field, which collapses onto it. We do not live on a level playing field. And I’m sorry for going off onto this rant as you know, it is my won’t to go off on a rant about that. But I think it means a lot when you’re talking about someone sustaining a project over time.

Rowan Mangan:
I agree with you. And look to be completely transparent, don’t send us a question if you are not willing for us to turn it into our own soapbox and reflect on it through our own prism.

Martha Beck:
But if you agree with us, we will validate the shit out of you.

Rowan Mangan:
Absolutely nonstop. It’s liable, isn’t it.

Martha Beck:
We all having fun.

Rowan Mangan:
So I think there’s also there, and again, this isn’t what Laurel asked, but it’s still worth saying. It fun.

Martha Beck:
I have an idea what you’re going to say. Go ahead.

Rowan Mangan:
So there’s a time economy factor and there’s people who have more disposable time and that’s the kind of privilege. I think we might have even talked about this before, but that’s the type of privilege that all privilege can be really invisible to you. And it’s amazing how precious it is and amazing how when it’s taken away, it is suddenly so impossible. I had my mom come and stay recently and she’s so wonderful and supportive and really wanted to give me a chance to work on this rewrite that I was still innocently attempting at that point. And so she would take Lila, we were spending some time in New York and she would take Lila off being a good nana and they’d go off to the playground and she’d take her out for a good 90 minutes or two hours. She gave me a really good chunk of time.

Rowan Mangan:
But it’s like what you were saying about the 20 minutes and everything, and it’s like I got a little done. But the kind of state that Laurel is talking about accessing that kind of creativity is the kind where you have hours upon hours and you can live in your work a bit. It was funny because mom is a great writer herself and spends a lot of time working on her work. And then she got home to Australia and she suddenly had all these social things. She’s like, “This is really weird. I haven’t really been able to work on it.” I was like, “That’s what I was saying.”

Martha Beck:
Thank you.

Rowan Mangan:
Sometimes it’s hard. All right.

Martha Beck:
And you really can’t imagine it when you’re in the privileged position. When I was in my 20s trying to write my first book, which was a memoir in the end, but it was a novel at the time. It took me nine years of writing and rewriting before and nobody wanted it. Nobody cared. And I was in a writing group and I had a friend who was very creative and very prolific and had been born into a very wealthy family. Very wealthy. So she would talk about, “This is how I’m getting this done. And I’ve started writing essays and I’ve written a book of poetry.” And I would sit there and I never did say to her, “But you’ve never cleaned a closet, you’ve never rented a car, you’ve never had to take a bus.” I was taking a sick baby to the emergency room in the middle of the night on the subway in the middle of a Boston winter because that’s what we had to deal with. And I never said it to her. And apparently, I’m still quite bitter.

Rowan Mangan:
I does feel that way, doesn’t it?

Martha Beck:
Yeah, I did. I got that. I see that now.

Rowan Mangan:
It’s funny and it’s so sad in a way. I feel so sad for you because in my life, my 20s, and I think a lot of people who don’t make babies and do a really intense Harvard thing.

Martha Beck:
I had a Mormon 20s in the middle of everything.

Rowan Mangan:
Mormon 20s. Yeah, non-Mormon 20s. There’s so much… I don’t know. I think about Dylan and everything. I heard Bob Dylan interviewed recently and he was saying… I don’t know if he’s still Christian or what, but someone was saying, “God, those lyrics that you wrote were amazing,” talking specifically about his heyday. He was like, “Yeah, I mean I must have had help. Right?” And the guy’s like, what do you mean? And Dylan just starts quoting himself and he’s like, “Couldn’t have really written that, could I?” And I just wonder how much of the absolute raw genius of youth is connected to… I mean, it’s a very 20th century kind of privilege as well.

Martha Beck:
Not being on a subway, taking a one-year-old to an emergency room?

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah, I don’t think Dylan was doing that.

Martha Beck:
I sincerely doubt that he did. And I’m actually developing quite a streak of bitterness now that you speak of it.

Rowan Mangan:
I’m sorry.

Martha Beck:
Everyone I grew up with was having babies by the time they were 20. Do you know the definition of a Mormon wedding? How do you know a Mormon wedding? The bride isn’t pregnant, but her mother is.

Rowan Mangan:
Oh God.

Martha Beck:
All right. So anyway…

Rowan Mangan:
All right, so anyway-

Martha Beck:
But we go astray.

Rowan Mangan:
We do. The culture will say to us, you can do long-term projects if you just have the moxie.

Martha Beck:
The moxie.

Rowan Mangan:
But the fact remains that there’s different sorts of stuff that we have to do and different tasks that take different brain states and correspondingly different amounts of time. And some things are just finite and you can check them off, but then some are part of that river you were talking about. And they’re slow moving and they’re deep. And it’s not the same.

Martha Beck:
It’s not the same. And it goes on for a long time to the extent that life not only can interfere, but always interferes. If you’re really in the deep slow river of creativity that is literally moving mountains, life is going to interfere. And Laurel is absolutely right. It’s hard. It takes grit and it takes… Well, we’ll find out what it takes, but it really, really is… If you don’t make a commitment to connecting with that river, it will not happen by itself because life will interfere. Maybe it’s because the culture is always pushing, always pushing, always pushing.

Rowan Mangan:
So we can’t segment our deep creativity into the half hour chunks that the culture and our lives realistically will allow us. But the culture will continuously cut. It wants to cut things into tiny pieces, which is the get up at 4:30, then meditate, then gratitude journal, then by 5:15, you’re on the treadmill. And so I think where culture wants to make things tiny, maybe the rebellion that we can enact on behalf of our nature is to spread, to zoom out, to recognize different units of measurement than these tiny segments. And what I inevitably come back to is the notion of seasons. Right?

Martha Beck:
Right.

Rowan Mangan:
To me, thinking about seasons, I love the way Americans talk about last spring or last summer. Naturally, we don’t do that in Australia that I’m aware of. And it, to me speaks to a time when things were a little slower and we could look at things with a gentler kind of focus.

Martha Beck:
And I think all people who lived close to the land in whatever part of the world, they knew the rainy season, they knew the dry season, they knew the cold season, and they were intimate with the seasons. And so doing anything logically would’ve had seasons. And that really lends itself to the slow deep river of creativity. Because if you’re going to do something long term, it has to be something you care about enough to see it through the winter, to let it go fallow and the ground to replenish itself and then still have the joy and energy when spring comes to fuel the growth of those little chutes and make them go up into huge towering plants.

Rowan Mangan:
And just recognizing too, it seems to me that even if it’s winter yet that the field is fallow, but we’re like, I don’t know, we are mending our nets, we’re repairing things, we’re doing things inside in front of the fire. We’re replenishing ourselves. Busy, not freezing to death and stuff. So there’s little tasks that we’re taking care of that are also within the flow of those seasons.

Martha Beck:
Well, I love that.

Rowan Mangan:
And they come back round.

Martha Beck:
They do. And it actually I was thinking about this and how it’s worked in my own life, and I thought there are some diseases, not to harsh anyone’s mellow, but there are some diseases that are called relapsing remitting.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah. It’s a type of multiple sclerosis, relapsing remitting.

Martha Beck:
Yeah. So I mean there’s a positive side to that too. What I thought of is my passions, sometimes they just go away. They just remit, they go away, but then they come back up again in a very seasonal way. So my riding has been that way through the years, but people are paying me to do that. I also have to do art. And that just keeps coming around and it’ll completely disappear for months and then it will come on like gangbusters. And maybe it’s just that if you let something have its own pace, it will find its season and it will carry you forward. Yeah.

Rowan Mangan:
Beautiful.

Martha Beck:
I actually think also that if you have the winter when you’re not working on something, you grow as a person and then when you go back to a deep project, you have more to put into it.

Rowan Mangan:
That’s true.

Martha Beck:
There’s a novelist whose early work I love, I’m not going to say who it is because this is a bad story, but he wrote a bunch of novels that I really liked. And then he finally was wealthy enough and had the freedom to just get a house in a beautiful area where no one would bother him. And every day people came in and did his cleaning in silence and left meals for him on the table. He didn’t have anything to do, but write, and he produced a novel that was so horrific. The one review I read of it said, how bad is this book? Let us count. It was stunningly bad. And I think it’s because he wasn’t living. He was just writing.

Rowan Mangan:
Wow.

Martha Beck:
So yeah, you shouldn’t be thrilled.

Rowan Mangan:
So there is a happy medium between when life happens too much for your creativity and when life doesn’t happen enough for your creativity, for sure.

Martha Beck:
And the balance is rare, I think for them to be perfectly balanced.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah, of course. But I think for me, the big thing is that the surrender of the moment has to be accompanied by a trust in the recurrence of the passion or the passion’s consistency and then the recurrence of opportunity.

Martha Beck:
If what you’re doing is meant to be… You talk about trusting in that moment of surrender, I actually will go a step further and go to faith because I’ve seen my trust be merited. I’ve found the time after years of not being able to even touch what I was loving and what I hoped to create, it came back. And speaking of touch, I talk about this all the time. We’re going traveling in a bit, and I can’t work on the book I’m supposed to be working on, but what I will do is I’ll go in and read a bit of it, maybe edit a few sentences and I have this living connection and the sense that it’s alive for me. It may be under the winter soil, but it’s alive.

Rowan Mangan:
It’s germinating.

Martha Beck:
When I do get the time and you will or you will, then it really is hard work. It’s not like it’s just… You have to have the tenacity of a pit bull, a crazy, mad pit bull when you do get the time. So it’s not easy, but the opportunity does come up, have faith in that and keep just gently connecting with the living thing that is your project.

Rowan Mangan:
That’s beautiful. I love the idea of seeing it as a living thing.

Martha Beck:
It was a river before but I love a mixed metaphor. That’s actually the deep project I’m working on.

Rowan Mangan:
So here’s my question, Martha Beck, here’s what I need you to solve for me today. So one of the things that happens with me is that I don’t want to ask you and Karen to do more, to take on more with Lila because that’s what it would usually take for me to take more time for my creativity. But then recently we had a whole lot of just logistical stuff to get through, and that had to be got through and there was issues around Lila and anyway, I’m trying not to be specific, but it’s just sounding weird. But anyway, I found that because I felt like if I didn’t do this logistical stuff really well, bad stuff would happen. Not terrible, but it wouldn’t be good.

Rowan Mangan:
It was much easier for me to claim that space and say, “Listen, I’m going to need a bit of extra support with Lila.” And was able to stake my claim there. And I was like, is there a way beyond the trusting and the faith that it’ll come back to view my creativity in a similar way where when no one’s asking for it and no one’s paying me to do it? Does that make sense?

Martha Beck:
Yeah, it does. But it also really speaks to your socialization because a lot of people, there are people who are raised in creative families who would stake a claim for their creativity, no problem. But you have psychological issues with, “Oh hey.” Sorry, you do. A mother should be taken care and we’re all mothers, right? But you are the birth mothers, so you should be taking care of this child instead of staking a claim for your creativity, you stake a claim for work, you stake a claim for logistics and you’re shy about staking a claim for your creativity. So anyone out there who feels that way, just notice that if you shifted your value system to, I totally deserve to have a creative life, maybe you’d stake a claim a little harder, faster. I don’t know. Anyway. But to your point about feeling like something bad will happen if you don’t do something, and that’s why you dare to stake the claim.

Rowan Mangan:
I realize how stupid that sounds.

Martha Beck:
No, it’s not stupid at all because I was thinking, but you should be motivated by love. Positive reinforcement is 51 times more effective than negative reinforcement. No, actually the thing is fear is a great motivator. Having a contract where I have to turn in a book is a great motivator. And I was reading a quote from Audrey Lord, the great feminist author the other day, and she said, “You will speak your truth and some people will love it and some people will hate it, and you’ll gradually get used to the haters.” And then she says, “You will end up at the end of your life knowing that the only thing more horrible and terrifying,” this is not a direct quote, it’s a paraphrase. The only thing more horrible and terrifying than speaking your truth or living your true life is not speaking it.

Martha Beck:
So think about going through your life with this recurring remitting passion that keeps coming and pulling you with that sirens on. Come be with me. Come create me. And realize that if you get to the end of your life and you haven’t done that, be afraid of that.

Rowan Mangan:
Wow.

Martha Beck:
And let that make you just say, “I’m sticking a [inaudible 00:36:50] buddy.”

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah. I love that. Thank you Marty.

Martha Beck:
Thank you, Rowe. Should we go off to our logistics and our long-term passionate projects now?

Rowan Mangan:
Let’s do it. And let’s just trust in the turning of the seasons.

Martha Beck:
And of course, 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.