Martha Beck:
Woo-ha! Hi, I’m Martha Beck.

Rowan Mangan:
And I’m Rowan Mangan. And this is another episode of Bewildered, the podcast for people trying to figure it out, figure it in, figure it upside down and inside out.

Martha Beck:
Have you figured it out yet?

Rowan Mangan:
Oh no, I figured it out years ago. I just keep this going as a kind of gimmick for the show.

Martha Beck:
That’s why we pay you the big bucks.

Rowan Mangan:
That’s why they pay me the big bucks.

Martha Beck:
So what are you trying to figure out, actually?

Rowan Mangan:
I’m actually trying to figure out—you know, being a lesbian parent is very rewarding, and it has interesting moments. So our daughter at time of forthcoming anecdote was four and a bit. We had a nice day. We had to get out of our house because potential buyers were coming to it. So we went to a park and in order to tire out the child, that sort of thing, a lot of other people had the same idea. Many people at the park. Picture it: sunny day, children delightfully playing everywhere. Parents kind of awkwardly following their kids around in that awkward way you do at a playground where you’re not climbing on the things, but you’re sort of standing near them. There was, blessedly, nearby a block of public toilets. Is that what we call them in this country?

Martha Beck:
No, but it’s so charming that you do it.

Rowan Mangan:
What do you call it?

Martha Beck:
I’m not going to tell you. I love it. I love you calling them a “block of toilets.”

Rowan Mangan:
A block of toilets.

Martha Beck:
Sounds like a child’s toy. I love it.

Rowan Mangan:
Public toilets, you all know what I mean. Anyway, Lila needed to use one. Many other children also needed to use one. There was—every stall in this sizable public toilet block was full with a small child and a parent, and there was a lot of conversation going on, mostly describing what was happening, giving direction, giving coaching, begging them not to open the door while mum had a chance to pee. All of that sort of thing. And then you know how sometimes for no reason a silence falls in a group that’s all talking, and then there’s inexplicably a silence?

And at that moment, Lila, for the first time in her life, vocalized the thought, “Why don’t I have a dad?” And I took a beat. I pulled up my pants. I felt like this was a conversation that would go better if I had my pants pulled up. And what I noticed was everyone had heard it, and everyone stayed quiet. Everyone wanted to hear because I mean, why doesn’t she have a dad? And then anyway, I attempted to answer, you know, “Some families have them, and some families are different…” And she goes, “Yeah, but why don’t I have a dad?” And I was like, look, I will have to explain science to you at a later date once I get my head around it. So I don’t know.

Martha Beck:
Oh my God, the birds and the bees and the hypodermics and the, oh my God, the doctor visits and the freezer with the egg in it.

Rowan Mangan:
The hypodermics and the fertility clinics of it all.

Martha Beck:
Hey, if it’s a freezer with an egg in it, could we make the birds into penguins because they sit on those eggs in subzero temperatures for months on end.

Rowan Mangan:
No one’s following that metaphor. No one.

Martha Beck:
IVF dads equal penguins. That is all you need to know. Donors, they’re not dads. They’re donors.

Rowan Mangan:
They’re donors. We have to be very clear about that.

Martha Beck:
Yeah, no kidding.

Rowan Mangan:
So Marty, what are you trying to figure out?

Martha Beck:
Oh, Lord. I—

Rowan Mangan:
Apart from international smuggling schemes.

Martha Beck:
Yes, I have been involved in international crime right now.

Rowan Mangan:
We are about to confess to Marty doing a crime.

Martha Beck:
Yeah, and it’s your fault.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah.

Martha Beck:
Because you insisted that on our trip to South Africa, to Londolozi, a place we love and shout out to all the time, that we bring home a rock. Now I just found one in my desk drawer. I get these every time I go to Londolozi. There’s a lot of quartz in the area. It’s sort of semi, it’s translucent quartz, very pretty. It’s pinkish. I always put a pebble in my pocket and take it home. But you said—

Rowan Mangan:
Quartz amplifies. It amplifies the energy. It amplifies something. I’m not sure. It amplifies whatever it encounters.

Martha Beck:
You just walk down the street and everything goes “Woah!” when you pass it. So anyway, you said, “I want a rock from Londolozi, a quartz rock from Londolozi, to put in our new place where we’re moving.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah.

Martha Beck:
So I was looking for a sizable—I was thinking baseball-sized rock. I got ambitious. And then our wonderful friend, Jamie Laburn, age 10 at the time, he came home from a drive with his dad with a piece of quartz bigger than my head. And he said, “Excuse me,” because for some reason he has a British accent instead of a South African one, “I’ve brought you a rock for your family.” I was like, “Is that my rock?” He’s like, “No, it’s for your family.”

Rowan Mangan:
Quite right, Jamie.

Martha Beck:
Yes, quite right, Jamie. It was beautiful. Apparently he’d seen it at a distance, climbed out of the Jeep, risked his life in the African savannah to bring us this massive rock. And his mom Bronwyn had already said to me, “We’ll put it in our garden. We’ll dedicate it to you. We’ll send beams to the new place.” And I said, “Yeah.” And I went back and I called home, I called Ro and Karen, and Ro said, “I want that rock.”

Rowan Mangan:
I got to have that rock. I need it.

Martha Beck:
And thus began my career as an international criminal.

Rowan Mangan:
And me as an accessory to an international criminal.

Martha Beck:
Because, all right, so I bring a checked bag and a roll-aboard. And I’m there for a month, and I’m quite proud that I can fit everything I need, including all the medicines that I fear I will need. Because there aren’t any pharmacies really nearby. Not at all.

Rowan Mangan:
And she fears that she’ll need a lot of medicines.

Martha Beck:
Yes. Although, by the way, if you go there, they will get you any medicine you need. I just found that out. Anyway, I always pack a lot of stuff, but it goes in two bags. And I am proud of packing relatively light. And so I thought, “I’ll just put the rock in my big bag and squish more stuff in my rolle-aboard.” So I did that and I tried to move the big bag filled with clothing and medicine and a rock the size of a freaking anvil. And it was basically immobile on its little wheels. It just sat there, squatted there, rooted by gravity to the place where it was. And I thought, “Oh boy, okay, this is what I’m going to do.” So I took all the clothes out of the little bag, put that in the big bag, take the anvil sized rock out, brought it and wrapped it in a towel, which really makes it look classy, and then stuck it in my carry-on luggage. And then I just sort of packed little things around it, like socks. So now my entire carry-on luggage consists of a rock, a really, really big one.

Rowan Mangan:
Rock and socks.

Martha Beck:
Rocks and socks. And every time I let go of that bag on wheels, it would roll away from me rapidly in whatever direction gravity took it because it was still extremely heavy. Like this poor man who tried to help me with it nearly killed himself. Anyway, I mean just by trying to lift it, not because he was upset. Trigger warning. Now that I’m a criminal, I just can’t control it. Anyway, I drag my carry-on trying to make it look normal weight. And I think, “Okay, I’m going to have to take this through security, the security clearance.” And Bronwyn said, “No worries. Rocks are not on the banned list.” You know, you can take a rock anywhere. And I said, “Okay, great.” So I go to security in Johannesburg and they say—they don’t say, “Excuse me, is this your bag?” They say, “Is THIS your bag?”

Rowan Mangan:
Not to everyone, just to you.

Martha Beck:
It goes through the x-ray machine and they look at me with wide eyes and go, “Is that your bag?” I was like, “Yeah.” I kind of expected this, but it’s a rock.

Rowan Mangan:
It’s fine.

Martha Beck:
So we go to the little check your bag area. And the guy unzips my bag and he looks and he’s like, “What is this?” I said, “It’s a rock.” And he’s like, “It’s a very big rock.” I said, “I know.” And he says, “Rocks are forbidden.” I was like—

Rowan Mangan:
Just generally.

Martha Beck:
They’re not on the list. And he was like, “No, no, don’t tell—shh! Don’t say that out loud. They will make you take it back and put it—they will make you check it if they see it.” And I said, “Let me show it to you.” He was like, “No! The cameras are on. I could let you go.” And then the light came and I said to him, “Oh, you could let me go if I gave you a present?” And he was like, “Shh!” So I get a bunch of South African rand out of my purse and I’m waving it around, and he’s like, “Put it in the suitcase!” So I stick it in the suitcase, and by this time I’m flustered and he’s saying, “Just relax.”

Rowan Mangan:
“You’re acting weird, stop acting weird.”

Martha Beck:
And I feel like I’m having sort of elicit sexual contact and everything, it’s very— And I know at this point a crime is being committed. I just don’t know who’s committing it.

Rowan Mangan:
Well, in fairness, you knew you were committing it. You just didn’t know if he was too.

Martha Beck:
I knew I was bribing a security agent. I didn’t know whether or not he was conning me about the rock, which he was. Okay? So we both committed crimes, but it was his fault. So I was like, “Whew! Near miss, baby.” And I rolled it around in Johannesburg thinking, “How do I get through Heathrow?”

Rowan Mangan:
Oh yeah.

Martha Beck:
Because South African rand, I could give him a handful and it was worth maybe $1.50. If I’m trying to bribe someone in British pounds, I’m going to have to sell everything. It still won’t be enough. Plus I don’t know how the culture’s going to take it. So I got a plan. I went to a touristy shop.

Rowan Mangan:
This is so you. This plan is so you.

Martha Beck:
And I got a small wooden African mask, very light. And I said, “I need you to bubble wrap that.” And they’re like, okay. And they put bubble wrap. I said, n”No, no. I mean, I really want you to bubble– I want you to put a lot of bubble wrap on this thing.” And they were like—

Rowan Mangan:
“You don’t understand how much bubble wrap I need for this lightweight wooden mask.”

Martha Beck:
I was like, “More, more!” So finally they give me this huge ball of bubble wrap with nothing inside it, basically. And I take it to the airport lounge, and I carefully peel off the tape and stick it to a table. It looks like I’m doing some perverted arts-and-crafts project in the lounge. And then I take my rock out of my bag, I take it out the towel, I roll it in the bubble wrap. Turns out it’s so heavy that if you roll it across bubble wrap, it just crushes all the bubbles. So I have to tenderly fold it again.

Rowan Mangan:
So it’s like… [imitates sound of bubble-wrap popping]

Martha Beck:
Yeah. And so I wrap it gently. I tape it up. And I put it back in my suitcase. It’s bigger than my head, way bigger in the bubble wrap, but it looks much more professional.

Rowan Mangan:
And that’s what you want for a rock, like a business rock.

Martha Beck:
So I fly to London and I get out, and here’s the thing you don’t know about London, about England. I went there to speak, I’ve been there to speak many times, and I always thought they’re going to laugh at me for being too woo-woo.

Rowan Mangan:
I’ve been there many times. I didn’t go there to speak, but I did end up speaking.

Martha Beck:
I go there and then I say things.

Rowan Mangan:
Then you’re like, “Well, that’s enough from me.”

Martha Beck:
What I found out doing seminars in England is that they’re super rational and critical and smart and highly educated with a huge streak of the woo-woo in their freaking culture.

Rowan Mangan:
Under the surface.

Martha Beck:
They’ve got the elves and the fairies and the Tolkien. I mean, where do you think Lord of the Rings came from? It came from England. Okay, so I’m going through the security thing in Heathrow with my massive anvil-sized rock. And they put it through, and the woman’s eyes go wild. And she says, “Is that your bag?” And I was like, “It’s happening now. I’m going to go full life coach!” So I say, “Yes, it is my bag and you won’t believe what I’ve got in it.”

Rowan Mangan:
A semi-automatic.

Martha Beck:
She’s like, “What is this thing?” So she opens the bag and there’s this massive wad of bubble wrap that looks like it might contain a human head, but I stay real cheerful.

Rowan Mangan:
Oh yeah.

Martha Beck:
I’m like, “It’s a sacred crystal from Africa that I am going to put in the foundation of my new home.” And she was like, “Oh? Really? Why, I’ve heard that they have certain qualities.” And I was like, “Oh yes, believe it. Believe it.” She’s like, “How do I know it’s really a quartz or a crystal?” I said, o”Oh, I’ll pull back the bubble wrap.” So I pull back the bubble wrap and there it is. And I’m like, “Isn’t it beautiful? Isn’t it magical?” And she’s like, “Why, yes, it’s quite lovely.” And I said, “If you rub it, if you rub it, it will bring you happiness and good fortune and good health.” And she’s like, “May I?” And I said, “Sure, go for it.” So she’s rubbing the rock. Now all the other security guards have come in because they also, they’re very curious and they all want a turn rubbing the rock. So everybody lines up, and I pull the bubble wrap back and they’re rubbing away at the rock, which at this point is starting to sound like a sexual reference. It always gets sexual at some point. And then somebody says, “Can you give us a blessing?” And I was like, “You betcha!”

Rowan Mangan:
You’re like, “Anything to stop you taking me to one of your little rooms with my enormous contraband.”

Martha Beck:
Yes. So I said, I pulled up the first two words of Tsonga Shangaan, which is the language spoken around Londolozi, which happened to be [speaks foreign language], something like that. I don’t know if I pronounced it right, but it sounded cool to me. It means, “Good evening, elephant.”

Rowan Mangan:
That well-known African blessing. Good evening, elephant.

Martha Beck:
And I knew that that was not a crime because the fact is the placebo effect is extremely powerful. And unless they’re listening to this, and their illusions are blown out, the people at that security gate are having happier lives because they rubbed that rock.

Rowan Mangan:
I don’t think it’s a crime anyway to tell people, to invite people to rub a rock. I don’t think even if their lives stayed the same, I don’t think that would ever technically be a crime.

Martha Beck:
I did a whole seminar based on it. Yeah. So yeah, I bribed a security guard. I lied to a whole bunch of other security people. I impersonated a mystical crystalmonger, and now I have to go on with my life.

Rowan Mangan:
But it went quite well, though. I got my rock.

Martha Beck:
Yeah, you got your rock, baby.

Rowan Mangan:
Thanks for that.

Martha Beck:
There went my life. But you got your rock.

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 you all have a great day now.

So we have a topic.

Martha Beck:
What? A topic?

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah. Most of them will probably have turned off by now, but yeah. Hi. We are a podcast with a topic. We are professionals.

Martha Beck:
And our topic today?

Rowan Mangan:
Our topic today is “Everything is bad.”

Martha Beck:
Stipulated. Thank you for being with us on this.

Rowan Mangan:
Glad you could be here.

Martha Beck:
Yeah.

Rowan Mangan:
All right, so let’s dig in a little further. So everything is bad, stipulated, but there’s a really strong cultural belief that we can only fix the bad things by riveting our attention onto them. Would you say that is a fair assessment, Marty Moo?

Martha Beck:
Oh yes. Yeah.

Rowan Mangan:
Okay. So then we may not say this bit out loud, but I think there’s also a further belief that our fixation on the bad itself will, if not solve the problem, then kind of absolve us from being part of the problem and make us part of the solution by default.

Martha Beck:
Perseverate on the wrong thing and it will either end it or make you good. Just the perseveration.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah, you’re not complicit because you feel like shit about it.

Martha Beck:
That’s right. That’s right. It’s like the guy who goes to the party and his mother doesn’t want him to, and he says, “But I’m going anyway.” And she says, “Okay, but at least you’ll have a terrible time. Don’t have fun.” We have a different perspective, though, and this whole podcast is about taking the cultural view that doesn’t quite work and reexamining it to see what might work better. So our perspective on this topic is that just focusing all our attention on bad things, it doesn’t work. It just flat out does not work.

Rowan Mangan:
And we are little people pleasers who are aware that this, what we’re going to say today could be controversial.

Martha Beck:
It will be controversial.

Rowan Mangan:
And I would like to say ahead of that, please don’t hurt us. We’re trying our hardest.

Martha Beck:
That was controversial.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah, I know. Look.

Martha Beck:
Why will it not work? Why is our controversial opinion true?

Rowan Mangan:
Because when you meet the energy of bad with the energy of bad, nothing changes, right?

Martha Beck:
Yeah.

Rowan Mangan:
We have to do something different than what the system’s doing. And what the system expects is that if it pulls the rope this way, you are going to pull the rope this way and the tug-of-war can continue until the end of time. Our friend Boyd likes to quote, I think, Terrence McKenna who says—said, RIP—”The system expects resistance. It does not expect abandonment.”

Martha Beck:
Mm-hm. Okay, now before you get very upset with us, don’t worry. We’re not saying that we don’t believe in activism. We do. We’ll get to that. But there are ways of thinking about our activism and ways of taking action that we think could be more effective without the cultural view that riveting our attention on the negative will stop the negative.

Rowan Mangan:
So I was thinking about this not too long ago. I went to the No Kings protest in our area.

Martha Beck:
I was out of the country. I didn’t go, but it’s not because—it was a long way and I had a rock.

Rowan Mangan:
She would’ve been there, but she had a rock at the time. And I saw a woman who held a sign that said, “Resist.” And I love her. I didn’t know her, but I love her and I’m so glad she was there and I totally know where she’s coming from. And to a certain extent, I completely agree with her, but it still kind of bothered me because I felt like resistance without anything else is about holding a line like you’re on a front in a battlefield and all you can do is resist an incursion. You cannot even advance. Not that I’m suggesting that either, but so you’re not changing anything, you’re holding the enemy at bay for now. But I think we think that that’s not ambitious enough, that’s not enough to address the “this is bad”-ness that we’re now facing as if you’re in the US, apologies as a nation. If you live on planet Earth, apologies as a species, as a member of all species, as a member of the ecosystem.

So I guess what I’m saying is resistance is not in my mind as powerful as creativity. And if our vibe is “Be the change you wish to see in the world,” it can begin with resistance. I think it can begin with resistance to what is, but it can’t end with that because that is stasis and stasis is status quo.

Martha Beck:
And that is so the history of the last 5,000 years.

Rowan Mangan:
Round and round.

Martha Beck:
Just aggressive forces opposing each other, coming to stalemate, maybe wiping out huge chunks of human beings and then putting exactly the same kind of system in its place. And the cycle starts again.

Rowan Mangan:
Obligatory Chinese—

Martha Beck:
Oh, you want that? Okay. Yeah. In China they used to say, “Under capitalism, man exploits man. Under communism, it’s the other way around.”

Rowan Mangan:
I feel like that’s seriously one of the most brilliant things I’ve ever heard. Because it applies to everything.

Martha Beck:
They’re good at a phrase. They’re great with idioms, the Chinese. Super efficient language. Love it.

Rowan Mangan:
I love that for them, love that for them. So I think there’s something in our culture, which as so often is the case, is actually just a macrocosm of something which lives in our psyches, like a tendency that our psyches have, which is the idea that dreaming and making beauty is antithetical to making change. Making beauty is like the dessert that you get to do after you’ve done the hard or the real work, which is demonstrating just how against things you are.

Martha Beck:
If you haven’t been in the ugly and if you haven’t bled and sweated, if you’re not really miserable for a long time in your resistance to the evil, you don’t get a chance to go do your “little art projects.” You know?

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah.

Martha Beck:
That’s sort of the cultural feel of it.

Rowan Mangan:
And Gandhi, that’s not what Gandhi was saying when he was saying, “Be the change you wish to see in the world.” He was saying be different, right? Don’t be it, be different from it. And resist is, to a certain extent, being it.

My mum told me once—regular listeners will know my beloved mum who has appeared on this show before, hashtag Other Butterflies, look it up. She told me once that when she was at a particularly disillusioned moment in her own life politically, she decided that she was going to live as if the revolution that she had hoped for had actually happened. And that to me is quite a powerful reframe of what we’re talking about.

Martha Beck:
And she does. She lives that way. She’s so cool.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah.

Martha Beck:
Now, I am thinking that there are going to be some people out there who have been struggling against oppression and evil and have been in activism and are probably thinking, “Are you seriously saying we should stop resistance? Are you seriously saying we should roll over and make macrame projects in the face of the evil that we’re seeing?” So let’s talk about it. Let’s put it on the table. Yeah. Here’s what you must be thinking right now.

Rowan Mangan:
What a cop-out. Must be nice to be so privileged that you can just talk about peace and love and understanding because you know that they’re not coming to beat down your door. The frickin’ hippies tried peace and love and then they all sold out and dominate the real estate market so no one else can buy a house for three generations. But some of us, I’m sorry, Ro and Marty, some of us actually want to make some changes to the world, which is inherently an unfair and oppressive, genocidal, fucked-up place where—

Martha Beck:
I don’t know if it’s inherent, but it’s certainly that way now.

Rowan Mangan:
All right, Harvard. All right, so if you’re not attending protests, calling your representatives, using your voice to call out oppression, then you’re complicit in the very real evil that is being perpetrated on real people right now.

Martha Beck:
I just want to remind everyone I was out of the country. I would’ve been at those, at the No Kings riots. They weren’t riots. Oops.

Rowan Mangan:
They wish it was riots!

Martha Beck:
Oh God. The peaceful, loving protests, yeah, that day.

Rowan Mangan:
Yes. Thank you. So what we’re saying is not, “Don’t call you representative.” What we’re saying is what if we still do the things, but we try and skip the angst about the things. What if we do the thing but also bring joy back?

Martha Beck:
So what we’re saying is that part of our jobs as people who want to change the world is to keep part of our attention, well, to keep our attention on the real, which is not just the oppression and the evil, but is also a very, very wide expanse of things that hold beauty and kindness and empathy and compassion and justice. If we want to become the change we wish to see in the world, we have to see the world as it is. And if we focus only on what’s negative, we become these little obsessive reprocessors of the negative, and we don’t reprocess the beauty and the kindness. So if we regulate our own systems first, if we keep ourselves in a state of biological and psychological and physical and spiritual presence that sees everything around us and inside us, not just what’s messed up, we will be in a better position to actually create a world that is balanced and beautiful.

Rowan Mangan:
And what if it’s like, “Oh, well, I guess. Must be nice. If you were living in northern Gaza right now, you wouldn’t be able to do that.” So maybe it’s part of the responsibility of our privilege to see things that clearly where we have it.

Martha Beck:
Yeah. And it’s interesting if you want to be a source of sanctuary and help because that’s what privilege should be doing in my view.

Rowan Mangan:
Agreed.

Martha Beck:
And that is what I see when I look at the world, at all the data around me, not just the negativity. I mean, speaking of the Johannesburg airport, I just remember two years ago when we went and Lila had eaten copious amounts of the local soil and she was so sick. And we went through that same airport and—

Rowan Mangan:
Actually made a podcast episode about this.

Martha Beck:
We did. And I have a friend who calls South Africa “fake Africa” because things are actually a lot easier there than they are in other parts of the continent. But even so, it’s a much more difficult place to live than the US, right? Much more problematic for the people there. And compared to having a sick child in an American airport, it was an absolutely different experience. People were running to help. Running out of their jobs to help us. Running down the whole airport to get fire so they could sterilize a spoon and get some medicine to put in her little tummy. And they did not even know us. And I was in there just weeping because here in this difficult place was so much beauty, so much love, so much selflessness. And that is part of, I mean the whole Ubuntu tradition that “I only exist because we exist in a matrix of love” that was represented there. And it makes me think about your phone algo because your brain works like your phone algorithm. Your algorithms on your phone.

Rowan Mangan:
Not your phone, sorry, just a point of order. Your phone doesn’t have an algorithm.

Martha Beck:
No.

Rowan Mangan:
There are apps, there are social media apps on your phone that have algorithms.

Martha Beck:
Yes. But most of us run around looking at our phones. And if you stare at something, buy something or even talk about something much, if your phone is listening to you, you start to get images of the things that you’ve been looking at already. So everything, the algorithms are designed to notice what you’re noticing and then give you more of what you’re noticing so that you notice it more. And then it starts to get exponential. The more you focus on something, the more it’s given to you, so the more you focus on it. So what this does is it feeds a little spiral in the brain that is going around and looking for things that to be anxious about. And it’s saying, “Okay, I’m very anxious about the darkness in the world. There is so much darkness. Oh my God, I just saw 90,000 more dark things now. I’m really anxious. I’m going to really…” And there is a part of the brain that does that, that is obsessed with control. It’s in the left hemisphere of the brain, and part of the left hemisphere’s characteristic is that it wipes out your knowledge of the existence of anything else.

Your right hemisphere doesn’t have that quality. It’s called a hemispatial neglect. So when you’re using your whole brain, and you’re looking at everything, and your attention is on everything in a kind of proportional way to what is actually happening, then what comes in is more real. And I’ve found it sustains our energy, and it honors the good in the world and then changes start to happen in our sort of personal algorithm that have a lot of positivity within them.

Rowan Mangan:
And what strikes me about what you’re saying—and it’s something, it’s a horse that we’ve kind of beaten to death, I think, on this podcast, but I don’t care, I’ll keep beating that dead horse—is that the left hemisphere is not where creativity abides. And if we can open to our whole brain, we can access the creativity that can solve problems, not the creativity that’s about macrame, necessarily.

Martha Beck:
Although macrame for peace could work, I don’t know.

Rowan Mangan:
Who knows? But creativity, not resistance is how we’re going to break this tug-of-war, this endless tug-of-war. Marty, I have to say something.

Martha Beck:
Okay.

Rowan Mangan:
As Lila would say, “I really hate to say this, but I have to.” Regular listeners will know that if there is a topic under discussion, I will, in my autistic database of a brain, have relevant lines from poet laureate of the show, Ani DiFranco.

Martha Beck:
Wait, are you saying there’s a perfect line from Ani DiFranco that describes exactly what we need to know?

Rowan Mangan:
Well, you say “line,” I’d say a verse.

Martha Beck:
More of a verse, okay.

Rowan Mangan:
You’ve got to put things in context.

Martha Beck:
Okay, let’s hear it.

Rowan Mangan:
May I quote verbatim?

Martha Beck:
I think you can and you may.

Rowan Mangan:
So this is how it goes. The perfect Ani lyric for the moment: “The more I get my focus right, the more I see how one could lose sight, that the many things that don’t suck rival the things that do. And we all live in the house of what we pay attention to.”

Martha Beck:
Ooh.

Rowan Mangan:
Right? Hence, the title of today’s podcast, “The House of What We Pay Attention To.” So where do we want to live? What sort of house do we want to live in? In other words, Marty, how do we come to our senses?

Martha Beck:
Well, I will tell you in a minute.

Rowan Mangan:
So where do we want to live? How should we decorate the house of what we pay attention to, Marty?

Martha Beck:
That’s such a—I love the way you just put that, how should we decorate the house? It’s like if you think about hanging pictures of the worst things in the world on the walls of your house, think how depressing your house would be. And yet we’re doing that at this cultural juncture.

Rowan Mangan:
And it wouldn’t help.

Martha Beck:
It wouldn’t help, that’s right.

Rowan Mangan:
It wouldn’t help anyone to put their misery on your walls.

Martha Beck:
So the idea is not that we stop looking at dark things. In a way, contrast—things that are dark and things that are light—if you’re painting like I like to do, you need the contrast, but you need all of it. You need everything, not just the fixation on what is negative. So this whole podcast is based on the idea that culture is about coming to consensus. So there are certain assumptions and beliefs that everyone shares, and we never question the veracity of these things because consensus makes them feel so true. But in this case, for example, and in many cases, it brings in a lot of bitter emotion, bitter experience, and then replicates it.

Jung says what we resist persists. And so we resist, resist, resist, and the resistance persists. And it’s exhausting, and it’s miserable, and it’s only a partial view of any moment. For most of us, almost all our lives are spent in times and places that have a much richer palette of colors than just the negative ones. So we also say that the way home from just consensus, coming to consensus, is coming to our senses. And that means seeing everything around us right now. But everything. So I’ve talked about the brain this, the brain that. The left side of the brain only sees partial things, the whole brain sees things in a more complete way. And it’s so interesting because even the focus on the brain is an example of our focus on the left hemisphere of the brain, which separates things from each other. Analyze means cutting things up. So we talk about the brain as if it’s not connected to every nerve in our bodies, but it’s really the whole neurological system that runs our senses. So when you drop into your senses, you not only drop into the whole brain, you drop into the whole neurological system, and now you’re touching, tasting, hearing, smelling. What did I leave out? Touch, taste, hearing, smell, sight, taste.

Rowan Mangan:
Did you say taste?

Martha Beck:
Taste, whatever. Yes. The things that you use to experience the world. So whatever you rivet attention on, you’re going to perceive more of it, which is going to increase your idea that it’s out there in the world, which is going to have that cyclical effect that the negativity has. But if you’re paying attention to everything, it gives you this expanding view of what’s real, and you’re bringing in what’s good as well as what’s bad. And you’re decorating your house with the whole, gorgeous, contrasting image of it. And you’re living in the present moment with the way your body is meant to move through this sensory universe. And that experience of being present in your senses is delicious. That I want everyone to have. And from there, as you said earlier, we can come up with creative solutions to the very real horrible problems that are happening all over the world.

Rowan Mangan:
And there’s something else.

Martha Beck:
But you can’t feel bad enough to make anyone in the world feel better.

Rowan Mangan:
That’s right. And there’s something else as well, and we’re probably going to go quite woo in a minute, but there’s something about, as a parent in this cultural moment, you read a lot of stuff about co-regulation and you teach your child to self-regulate their nervous system via initially pro-regulating. So your job as a parent is to get centered and get calm and be in a parasympathetic nervous system state yourself, and you kind of entrain the kid to be in that state when they’re dysregulated. And I feel like that’s something that can be extended outwards. And this is like semi-woo, I think we’re going to go forward, but if you think of it as a ripple effect. Like you were talking to me this morning about how you’ve been focusing—you know, in our household, there has been certain moments of distress around certain news stories that have been finding their way into our psyches. And so there’s three of us and then there’s Lila and Adam. And if Karen and I go into a place of distress of dysregulation, you’ve been focusing on trying to manage your own energy so that to try and help balance, right, balance it out.

Martha Beck:
Yeah. Yeah. What I saw, coming back from Africa, was that you and Karen were in the other room and a news story came in that upset you. Lila was completely not, she didn’t seem to be paying any attention to you, but as you both, you didn’t scream or, I mean there was this sick feeling of, “Oh, I can’t believe this has happened.” And immediately I watched her, as if someone had slapped her, almost, and she couldn’t hear you, it was just she went, she just got very dysregulated, and she started thrashing and fussing and pounding things. And I was like, “Wow, this is real, this works.”

Rowan Mangan:
And so therefore, if we’re cultivating in full clear-eyed knowledge of the horrors—that’s shorthand—if we can work to keep ourselves regulated and trust that on some level there’s a rippling out then of a state where we can access our right brains, where we can access creative solutions to problems, and where we can actually potentially bring ease and comfort as well. Because fuck knows your anxiety is not calming anyone down.

Martha Beck:
No, it is not.

Rowan Mangan:
And that’s not a blamey thing. That’s just like, God, we’re such funny little monkeys, we humans.

Martha Beck:
It’s permission to let it go is what it is. We’re not blaming anybody for causing dark experiences because we feel bad. But I do think we all need to give ourselves permission to just let it go without thinking that that’s going to stop us from solving the problem.

Rowan Mangan:
And I feel like it even solves the problem on the, like there’s a very cause-and-effect, materialist way of reading this idea as well, right?

Martha Beck:
Okay. Say more.

Rowan Mangan:
My place of refuge right now when I’m thinking bad thoughts is to think about gardening and to plan the garden that we’re going to have when we move. And so that’s my current happy place, but it occurs to me that say you feel crappy about the world, so you go work in the garden, right? It makes you feel a bit better. Then six months later your neighbor is like, “I forgot to do my garlic, or my garlic harvest didn’t work this year.” And you say, “Here’s some garlic.” And then suddenly over a process of energy transfer of interaction, of community, you become part of a cog in a mutual aid mini-pod that is arguably the best kind of unit from which to affect change. Way more powerful than the individual.

Martha Beck:
Yeah, I love that and I love the ripple effect and the way you’ve described it going out. But I also love that what you’re describing—going outside, putting your hands on the dirt, smelling garlic, planting it, touching things, listening to the sounds outside, hearing your neighbor’s need through language and through vocal tone—you’re dropping into your senses when you’re doing these things that also ripple out to create community. And the dropping in is regulating, and then the ripple effect is regulating not only on the level of the nervous system but on the level of sort of socioeconomic exchange, which that would be cool if it got universalized.

Rowan Mangan:
Right? And what if everything is a metaphor for everything else, or everything is a degree more or less abstract than the other thing, couldn’t that exchange also happen—I don’t know, I’m trying to think of a way to push you into a full-on jump the tracks.

Martha Beck:
Ah. I think we just need to use the phrase “jump the tracks.” Let me tell you how. I came up with this phrase when my son was born because I could, even though I was fully accepting his intellectual difference, he has Down syndrome, I couldn’t make his life feel like a joyful future unless I did something. I was very much into sort of the intellectual brew of Harvard at the time. Drink, please. And it was very materialist and I just didn’t see a place for my son in that world. So I would completely jump the tracks into a world where materialism was not the only reality and where there was a potential for his presence in this existence to mean something that my previous worldview didn’t even understand because I felt that about him, frankly.
I mean the way Lila got dysregulated when you two were feeling scared, Adam in a room can settle people down.

Rowan Mangan:
Absolutely.

Martha Beck:
Have you noticed that?

Rowan Mangan:
Oh God, yeah.

Martha Beck:
I mean his whole life, he’s been doing this. When he was a baby and now that he’s an adult, it works the same way. So jumping the tracks for us is let’s just throw out the whole materialist part of the culture and say—

Rowan Mangan:
No, no, let’s include it with the materialist part of the culture.

Martha Beck:
You’re right. We don’t throw anything out.

Rowan Mangan:
Let’s bring in alongside it.

Martha Beck:
Because there is material reality and there is logic.

Rowan Mangan:
And there’s literal garlic and literal neighbors there.

Martha Beck:
Wait, what? Literal garlic?

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah.

Martha Beck:
I had thought that garlic was purely metaphoric. That’s how crazy this is getting. All right, so what if you’ve got a field effect happening, a “morphogenic field,” Rupert Sheldrake calls it. And he’s actually a really smart guy, even though he’s been mocked endlessly for being so woo-woo. He’s a British scientist. He talks about these fields that connect everyone. He wrote a book called Dogs that Know When Their Owners Are Coming Home talking about—

Rowan Mangan:
What’s it about?

Martha Beck:
I think it’s about gardening, actually. But he talks about how there’s a spread of information and mood and just sort of states of being that communicates across distance. What if we actually are generating more goodness when we include the good in our worldview?

Rowan Mangan:
Right.

Martha Beck:
So we see the horrors. God, I see the horrors. And I’m not going to stop looking at that, but I’m going to start looking at more so that instead of just pushing back, instead of just resisting evil, which makes me stuck in resisting.

Rowan Mangan:
And it makes you transmit resistance, arguably.

Martha Beck:
Yes. Yeah.

Rowan Mangan:
So what else can we transmit?

Martha Beck:
What if I go into an intense field of presence, and I start to experience my senses and that works like the algorithm on my apps on my phone, and it starts to bring more sensory beauty in, and then I start to generate that field. I think this may actually, literally be true. And even if it’s not, at the very least it’s going to make me a more resilient, robust, and happy stand-up-for-goodness person. Is there a word for that? Advocate of the good. I don’t even know.

Rowan Mangan:
Good guy.

Martha Beck:
I just know that I want my house decorated with the whole shebang, the whole range of beauty in the world. And I actually think that the Ani quote is true. There’s actually the good at least rivals the bad. And the more we focus on the good, I think the better chance we give it to rival the bad.

Rowan Mangan:
And to come back to another metaphor that we’ve tortured in this episode, the algorithm will show you more of what you like, but often those of us who do scroll mindlessly for part of our wild and precious life are consciously training our algorithm to say, give me more. I’m going to like this. Not because I especially like this, this one individual piece of content, but because I’m saying take me towards the funny gardeners of TikTok. And I feel like I’m struggling to exactly transfer this to the life algorithm, but I really want to. So bear with me.

Martha Beck:
Here we go. Here we go.

Rowan Mangan:
I’m going to hit “like” on things that are good and wholesome. So I like community. So what I’m going to do to train my life algorithm is I’m going to turn up to some community events, even if they’re not overtly political, especially regardless of political content. I’m going to turn up to community events. I’m going to go to book readings. I’m going to go to trivia nights because that I have to believe that clicking “like” on my personal algorithm has some sort of input into the universal algorithm and adds #community to the rainbow of colors…and that’s how you stick it to the man.

Martha Beck:
There you go. I’m going to trivia night. Haha, take that, system! Yeah, mine is literally all dogs and otters, dogs and otters. I do that on my phone. That is what I like. And I will continue to like dogs and otters in the real world until there are many, many more dogs and otters. I believe it. I believe it’s going to generate more.

Rowan Mangan:
So to wrap up this strange and meandering conversation, Marty, I want to ask you, why should we let ourselves feel good and see the good and do the Jack Gilbert thing of having the stubbornness to accept our gladness—

Martha Beck:
In the ruthless furnace of the world. Even with sorrow everywhere, slaughter everywhere, he says, we must have the stubbornness to accept our gladness because—we’re going to blend two of our favorite poets—we will always live in the house of what we pay attention to. And we want to make that house beautiful for ourselves and for everyone.

Rowan Mangan:
Because when you really think about it, that’s another way to….

Martha Beck & Rowan Mangan:
Stay wild.

Rowan Mangan:
We hope you’re enjoying Bewildered. If you’re in the USA and want to be notified when a new episode comes out, text the word WILD to (570) 873-0144. We’re also an 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. Bewildered is produced by Scott Forster with support from the brilliant team at MBI. And remember, if you’re having fun, please rate and review. And stay wild.