The One You Feed - Maggie Smith on Writing for Healing

Episode Date: January 19, 2021

Maggie Smith is a poet whose work has been widely published, anthologized, and has appeared in Best American Poetry, the New York Times, The New Yorker and elsewhere.  Her latest book, Keep Moving: Notes on Loss, Creativity, and Change, a collection of essays and quotes, is a national bestseller. In this episode, Maggie and Eric discuss this new book and how for her, writing poetry is having a conversation with herself, problem solving, and healing on paper. If you’d like to start out this new year restoring some balance and putting some healthy habits in place, or if you’re tired of waiting for the right circumstances to make progress towards your goals, Eric, as a behavior coach, can help you. To book a free, no-pressure 30-minute call with Eric to see if working with him in The One You Feed Personal Transformation Program is right for you, click here.But wait – there’s more! The episode is not quite over!! We continue the conversation and you can access this exclusive content right in your podcast player feed. Head over to our Patreon page and pledge to donate just $10 a month. It’s that simple and we’ll give you good stuff as a thank you!In This Interview, Maggie Smith and I discuss Writing for Healing and…Her book, Keep Moving: Notes on Loss, Creativity, and ChangeThe dark time in her life that gave birth to her growthHow hope is imaginative and necessary if you’re to come out of difficultyThe role of endurance in healingGratitude as a practice even in the darkest timesThat big life changes are often identity issues that cause us to ask “who am I now?”Another meaning to the phrase “it’s always something!”The reality that we pave the path of the future one step at a timeHer experience as a recovering pessimistThe difference between her poetry and her essaysThe role of setting in her poetryHow it never feels good in the long run to have done the wrong thingPost Traumatic GrowthMaggie Smith Links:maggiesmithpoet.comInstagramTwitterKiwiCo: The subscription service that sends your child hands-on science, art, and geography projects each month to build confidence, creativity, and critical thinking skills. Get 30% off your first month plus free shipping on any crate line with the promo code FEED at www.KiwiCo.comFitTrack Dara Smart Scale: It accurately measures 17 vital health metrics including body composition, hydration levels, and so much more. Stop measuring weight and start measuring health with FitTrack. Go to www.getfittrack.com/wolf to get 50% off your order – plus! for a limited time, you’ll save an additional 10%! Calm App: The app designed to help you ease stress and get the best sleep of your life through meditations and sleep stories. Join the 85 million people around the world who use Calm to get better sleep. Get 40% off a Calm Premium Subscription (a limited time offer!) by going to www.calm.com/wolfIf you enjoyed this conversation with Maggie Smith on Writing for Healing, you might also enjoy these other episodes:Writing as a Path to Awakening with Albert Flynn DeSilverPower of Poetry with Ellen BassSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Fresh starts. Do you believe in fresh starts, Chris? I do. I've had multiple fresh starts in my life and always for the better after I got through them. Yeah, those of us in recovery certainly believe in fresh starts because suddenly there's a day where it's like everything sort of changes, right? 14 years ago for me was the last drink. So yeah, we can make big changes i can also think back about seven years ago to kind of when i became a steady meditator and helping people find that fresh start and making those consistent long-term changes in their life is what i do in the one you feed personal transformation program so if you're looking for a fresh start in 2021 go to ericzimmer.coach application and sign up for a 30-minute call with me and we'll talk about whether I can help you or not. No pressure, no hard sales,

just an opportunity to talk about you and your life and see if we're a fit and I'll make sure that you get some information that's helpful to you either way. That's ericzimmer.coach application. The future is empty. I'm making it up as I go. I don't know what will happen. Probably there will be some plot twists. Not all of them will be good. The past has told us that.

Welcome to The One You Feed. Throughout time, great thinkers have recognized the importance of the thoughts we have. Quotes like, garbage in, garbage out, or you are what you think, ring true. And yet, for many of us, our thoughts don't strengthen or empower us. We tend toward negativity, self-pity, jealousy, or fear. We see what we don't have instead of what we do. We think things that hold us back and dampen our spirit. But it's not just about thinking. Our actions matter. It takes conscious, consistent, and creative effort to make a life worth living.

This podcast is about how other people keep themselves moving in the right direction, how they feed their good wolf. I'm Jason Alexander. And I'm Peter Tilden. And together, our mission on the Really Know Really podcast is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like why the bathroom door doesn't go all the way to the floor, what's in the museum of failure, and does your dog truly love you? We have the answer. Go to reallyknowreally.com and register to win $500, a guest spot on our podcast,

or a limited edition signed Jason bobblehead. The Really Know Really podcast. Follow us on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Thanks for joining us. Our guest on this episode is Maggie Smith, a poet whose work has been widely published, anthologized, and has appeared in Best American Poetry, The New York Times, The New Yorker, and the list goes on and on. She's also a Columbus, Ohio native, which we are very proud of. Today, Maggie and Eric discuss her new non-poetry book, Keep Moving, Notes on Loss, Creativity, and Change. Hi, Maggie. Welcome to the show. Oh, hi. Thanks for having me. I am really happy to

have you on. We're going to be talking about your book called Keep Moving, Notes on Loss, Creativity, and Change. But before we do that, we'll start like we always do with a parable. There is a grandmother talking to her grandson. She says, in life, there are two wolves inside of us that are always at battle. One is a good wolf, which represents things like kindness and bravery and love. And the other is a bad wolf, which represents things like greed and hatred and love. And the other is a bad wolf, which represents things like greed and hatred and fear. And the grandson stops and he thinks about it for a second and he looks up at his grandmother and he says, well, grandmother, which one wins? And the grandmother says, the one you feed. So I'd like to start off by asking you what that parable means

to you in your life and in the work that you do. I love that parable. I was thinking about how when you feed something, it thrives. If you want to feed a fire, you give it oxygen. If you want to starve it, you take that oxygen source away. And when you feed something, it gets bigger and stronger. And I think for many years, without realizing it, I was feeding my fear more than anything else. And it was, you know, sort of unbeknownst to me, getting bigger and stronger. I was giving it oxygen every day. And I call myself a recovering pessimist because when I was going through probably the hardest year of my life, I decided to feed my hope instead, really just out of need, just to function. I needed to feel something other than fear. And so I tried feeding that every day with small actions. And what surprised me was that it got bigger and stronger and sort of won out

over the fear, at least some days. I think some days one wolf is maybe edging out the other one. I think some days one wolf is maybe edging out the other one. It's not always a straight shot. Some hours I'm doing better than other hours. But what I really learned was it's about making conscious choices of years to give more attention and energy to the things that are going right into the places where I can make a positive change rather than allowing myself to sort of backslide into worry and worst case scenario thinking, which is really easy to backslide into. And the more I focus on the good stuff, the more I notice it, the more it presents itself to me. Learning that about a daily practice, for me, it was writing, you know, writing myself a little pep talk every day and focusing on something positive. That daily practice of feeding that positive part surprised me in how effective it was to spend time doing that, especially first thing in the morning

every day. And it also alerted me to the fact that I hadn't been doing that and that the reason my fear was so big is that it was getting all the attention and talking the loudest and taking up all the air in the room. A lot of people ask, well, how do you get from being someone who's afraid to being someone who's brave? It's just a switch that you can flip on or off. And I don't think that's it at all. I think it's little things that you do on a daily basis based in awareness and trying to turn your attention toward something that maybe feels unnatural, like optimism when you're depressed. Right.

Yeah, yeah. Even that question assumes that we are one type of person or the other. I'm a brave person. I'm afraid of person. And we certainly have tendencies. But those tendencies, even outside of some genetic component, are simply the results of what has been fed up to that point. Oh, completely. Consciously or unconsciously, you know, we are simply just a result of constant causes and conditions. And so to even assume that I'm a brave person or I'm an afraid person is imputing a constancy that we may just not have. Yeah, absolutely. And also you need fear in order

to be brave. I mean, if you didn't have any fear, you wouldn't need courage. So it's kind of handy like that. It actually, it forces you to work that muscle. If you weren't scared, you wouldn't have a thing to overcome. The bravery would be kind of a moot point. Yep. I want to come back to the recovering pessimist part and ask you a couple of questions about that, particularly as it relates to poetry. But before that, let's back up and just set the stage for this latest book. It's called Keep Moving, Notes on Loss, Creativity and Change. And up until this book, you had been a poet primarily. You've been known for writing poems. And this book is not a poetry book. It's a collection of short little daily things that

you wrote yourself that you needed during a really difficult time in your life. Can you sort of set up that difficult time in your life just to give listeners a sense of kind of where this emerged from? Yeah. In the fall of 2018, my marriage ended. And so after, I don't know, 18 and a half years and two kids, I was suddenly thinking, okay, what now? What do I do now? And I was in a really dark place. And one day I just got up and I wrote myself a little note to self. And the first one was, it was something about burning grief and anger as fuel and using it to get through the day.

And that was where the phrase keep moving came from. It was from that fuel, just keep going. And it felt really good to just write that thing to myself. And I posted it on social media more as a way of sort of holding myself accountable for that intention, but also as a way of kind of coming clean, because I think those of us on social media can agree probably that we maybe present ourselves at our best light there. And we have these sort of curated feeds. And we don't always align our online selves or public selves with what's happening inside our homes, you know, behind closed doors. And it felt important to me to align those two selves instead of just saying, hey, I published

a poem on the internet. Meanwhile, I'm barely getting out of bed at home. I just, I needed to be one person in the world. And that one person was having a hard time. But what I found was, as I did this as a daily practice, it was helping me, but I started hearing from other people on Twitter or on Instagram or people, if they knew me, would text me or email me and say, oh my gosh, I needed this today. Or this thing that you wrote for yourself just got me through the last three hours, or I wish I had had some of these five years ago when I was going through my own worst year. And it was the strangest thing because I've never felt more alone than I did in like those first few months when everything really just imploded. And then at the same time, I'd never felt more,

really just imploded. And then at the same time, I'd never felt more like a greater sense of purpose and community because suddenly these things I was writing to myself meant something to other people who had their own stuff going on, whether it was a divorce or a job loss or, I mean, this was pre-pandemic. So, you know, a lot of us are going through stuff right now, but a couple of years ago, we were going through stuff too. So, you know, a lot of us are going through stuff right now. But a couple of years ago, we were going through stuff to, you know, life, life didn't just get hard in 2020. Right, I got harder, but not hard. Yeah, reading the book definitely took me back to when my marriage imploded, my son was two. And I was so devastated when it happened. And reading it sort of took me back to that. And,

you know, I certainly thought your book would have been a lovely thing to have during that point. My lifeline was a book called When Things Fall Apart by Pema Chodron, which is such a powerful book about similar ideas, right? And I think the thing that I loved about what you're doing through that book is you're showing that like there is something brighter up ahead and that this loss and pain can transform you. And at the same time, this really sucks. Yeah, it's both. Both those messages are really important because we just give people the, boy, this is going to be, you're growing, you know, what a growth opportunity, right? You're

just like, shut up, right? But if on the other hand, all we see is the pain, we get lost in it. And so I always feel like to give people both is a tricky balance. And I felt like the book did a nice job of that. Oh, I'm so glad. Yeah. I mean, I think if you only focus on how wrong everything is, you lose your sort of hope and motivation to keep pressing forward. I mean, that's a really dangerous headspace to be in. Hope is imaginative. And if you can't picture the future being better than the present, if you can't picture yourself crawling out of the bottom of that dark well, then it's going to be really hard to take steps to do that. But at the same time, yes, I, you know, have never really been much of a self-help

reader. And obviously I call myself a recovering pessimist. So I've never really been much of a Pollyanna or a particularly hopeful person. I was sort of the Eeyore in my family, which is why all of the things that have happened in the past couple of years are kind of funny if you're in my family. But I think it's really important to be able to hold both. And it's not even a but, it's an and. Like everything is terrible right now. And so much is suddenly possible

because this thing just burnt down. And now it's not only that I have to make it something else, I get to make it something else. I get to make it up now. I get to build something from scratch. And sort of shifting my thinking from the have to to the get to has been part of what I've been working on personally. I do have to do it because no one else is going to do it for me. But also it does feel like an opportunity to maybe do some things differently that I wouldn't have thought to do when I, you know, met my ex-husband in my early 20s. And what does your life look like when you build it in your early 20s? And then if you either get to or have to or are forced to reevaluate in your 40s or

in your 50s or in your 60s, what might you do differently? Yep. Because you're not exactly the same person anymore either. And maybe some of the things that you would have gone along with just because of sheer momentum or inertia. How are those two things related exactly? Maybe you wouldn't do those things the same anymore. Yeah. really interested in how people change, we do know that there are few things as fertile for true transformation than just basically heart-wrecking loss. You'd never wish it on

anybody. You actually say that at some point in the book. I never would have chosen any of this, but since it was chosen for me, I'm going to choose to create something out of it. And we do know that real loss and real pain can have a transformative effect like few other things, because the rest of the time, life just kind of goes along and you steer the shift and make some changes. But that sort of when it all, as you say, burns down can be a really powerful time. But again, to say that has to be done with a certain degree of delicacy because again, nobody wants to hear it. It makes me think of an Anne Lamott quote, which is, it's similar. She basically says something like, yeah, yeah, yeah. Let go and

let God, I know, I know, you know, and if I could, I would. And in the meantime, I want to stab you on the forehead with a fork, right. Or something like that. You know, it's that basic idea of like, yeah, I know this is a growth opportunity, but zip it about it because I'm dying over here. Yeah. I definitely went through a period where if one more person said, what doesn't kill you makes you stronger. I was just like, I don't want to be stronger. I want to be happy. Yes. I just want to feel better. I don't want to be better. I don't want to grow. I just want to feel okay. I just want to function. That's right.

Yeah, that's a hard pill to swallow for people, I think, is that, you know, you're growing and this is going to be really good for you. And, you know, one of the things that I tell people when they're going through their own stuff, because now people call me when they're going through things. own stuff because now people call me when they're going through things. I do say it gets better because I do think that is fair to say. It gets better. It gets easier. Not because you get to heal. I have a real dubious relationship with the word healing. Not because you get to heal or set down the thing that you're carrying, but because you will learn how to carry it better and differently. And so it's not always going to hurt the way that it hurts right now, but you're not ever really going to be able to set it down either. And that's like the sort of tough love realistic part, I think, of this book, which is like, you just learn how to carry it differently and that's okay. Let's talk about the word heal. That would be an interesting place to take it. Tell me why

you're dubious about it. I think healing feels like a cure. Like there's a cure for the human condition, which I don't think there is. There's a Beckett quote that I'm not going to be able to think of exactly, but it's something like, you're on earth, there's no cure for that. There isn't. So if your heart is broken, if you lose a child, if your marriage ends that you thought was a forever thing, if the career you thought you would have that you've been working for all your life is suddenly up in smoke. Healing feels a little too neat to me. My friend, the poet Dana Levin said recently something about, it's not about healing, it's about endurance. And that to me feels right. And that I think maybe speaks to that carrying, like healing suggests that you get to set it down or that you don't feel it anymore. And I think endurance to me suggests that you just learn how to live with it better. And that feels more realistic to me. Healing sounds great. I mean, don't get me wrong. I am team healing. If that is on the menu,

I'm ordering it. I don't necessarily believe that it's on the menu for me. Yeah. I have mixed feelings about that. I think I can look back at some things in my life, that marriage I told you falling apart happened when my son was two and a half and he's 22 now. So 20 years ago. And I can largely say it doesn't feel like I'm still carrying it, but it's been a long time. That gives me so much hope, though, because I'm only two years out. So that gives me hope that maybe my sense of healing is just the fact that I'm just not there yet. I need the endurance to get me through the years until that maybe I feel some of the healing. But some things like the loss of a child, I would be willing to believe that never fully heals. It seems to me it wouldn't.

Before I did this, I had a solar energy company and it was my life and my hope and my dream. I had to put it down and I thought I would be heartbroken about that forever. And I occasionally still feel a little something about it, but the podcast emerged out of it. But I think the interesting thing about healing is my experience with it has been the only hope to whatever extent healing is possible. For me, it comes through being really fully willing to

feel it. The thing I did right when that relationship fell apart was I just fell apart. That's what I did right. I allowed myself, if I'd followed advice way longer than anybody would have said would be appropriate, I allowed myself to sob. I wrote angry letter after angry letter after angry letter that I destroyed. I really worked to move those emotions through. I think that's so smart. That's the important part. All this stuff is such a tricky balance. Back to this idea of we need both and. We've got to feel the feelings. And sometimes if we just immediately jump to, oh, it's going to be okay, we bypass that process.

Now, in my case, and it sounds like in your case, that wasn't even an option. There wasn't even an option to bypass the feelings. Like if I could have, I'm almost certain I would have. If that had been on the menu, I would have ordered it. Exactly. Yeah. It's just not who I am as a person. I mean, that's the part of writing this book. I remember writing this book and talking to a friend at a coffee shop as I was writing this book and thinking, what am I doing? I'm basically spending this year of my life, not only feeling all of

this, but having to process it in words. And so even professionally, what was paying my bills was stewing in my own juices. And I just thought, you know, maybe this isn't the right thing. And then I realized actually it was exactly the right thing because I think if I had done something else for work, if I had had a regular day job, I could have thrown myself into that job and not processed all of this stuff. When a relationship ends, especially a long one, it's never just about that. It's about everything else. It's about who am I and who were we and what was all of this? And I mean, it's just such big questions. And I think as painful as it was to really go in and feel everything, it was really useful. Writing Keep Moving was really useful because it forced me to face myself every day.

And really, I never let myself off the hook. And I probably, if not healed, I probably processed things better and got to a better place faster than if I had spent that time distracting myself from it. That makes me think a little bit. I often say to this to people, the second time I got sober, I was in a relationship with somebody who was a heavy drinker. And it was around me all the time. And I don't recommend that.

And if I could have changed it, I would have. But it built a strength in me that I was no longer like, I had to go into that awkward duckling phase that all alcoholics go through. It's like suddenly I have to emerge into the world where people drink again. I was kind of prepared for that. I want to read one of your little, what do you call them? I call them notes to self. I want to read a little one, A, to give listeners a sense of kind of what the book is made of. And it's one that speaks to what we've just been talking about. Stop calling your heart

broken. Your heart works just fine. If you are feeling love, anger, gratitude, grief, it is because your heart is doing its work. Let it keep moving. There it is. Yeah, I remember describing myself as brokenhearted over and over again. And it just hit me one day that metaphor, because so much of the way we talk on a daily basis is metaphor. So much of the way we talk about grief and change, it's all like journey and struggle and battle. I mean, it's all metaphor.

And it occurred to me, like, actually, my heart's not broken. It's working. If it were broken, I might feel better because I wouldn't be feeling all of this pain. It's definitely working. Oh, it's in there. It's in there. I'm Jason Alexander. And I'm Peter Tilden. And together on the Really Know Really podcast, our mission is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like why they refuse to make the bathroom door go all the way to the floor. We got the answer.

Will space junk block your cell signal? The astronaut who almost drowned during a spacewalk gives us the answer. We talk with the scientist who figured out if your dog truly loves you and the one bringing back the woolly mammoth. Plus, does Tom Cruise really do his own stunts? His stuntman reveals the answer. And you never know who's going to drop by. Mr. Bryan Cranston is with us tonight.

How are you, too? Hello, my friend. Wayne Knight about Jurassic Park. Wayne Knight, welcome to Really, No Really, sir. Bless you all. Hello, Newman. And you never know when Howie Mandel might just stop by to talk about judging. Really?

That's the opening? Really, no really. Yeah, really. No really. Go to reallynoreally.com. And register to win $500, a guest spot on our podcast, or a limited edition signed Jason Bobblehead. It's called Really, No Really, and you can find it on the iHeartRadio app, on Apple Podcasts,

or wherever you get your podcasts. the iHeartRadio app on Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. Another thing that I wanted to touch on, and I'm kind of just jumping around because the book is lots of these little notes. So I just extracted a lot of them that spoke to me. But one that spoke to me and I was thinking about is, it says, remember when you would have been over the moon thrilled to have just a fraction of your life as it is now look around you, it is enough. And I kind of wanted to talk about that because as I was reading your book, I was so struck by, and I'm sure other people have commented upon this is the book starts with you in devastation. And now your life, I mean, at least from a

professional success, you know, you and I have talked about like, you know, you're on the today show, you're interviewed by Maria Shriver, like amazing things are happening. You know, it was so interesting to me to sort of be watching it from the end. And I know it's not the end stories actually never end, but this vantage point looking back, but that idea of remember when you would have been over the moon thrilled to have just a fraction of your life as it is now. Yeah. I mean, even for sure now, there are things that have happened related to this book that I never would have dreamed of. even at my worst, even at my lowest, I had two healthy kids and a house on a street with neighbors I love and a freelance career that I found really fulfilling and friends and family who loved me and had my back when I really needed them. So even then, even when I was at the bottom of the well, I needed to take the time and

look around and say, okay, actually, yes, this one piece, which was a really big piece, like I'm not minimizing it. It's a really big piece. This piece has now sort of like broken off the continent and is sailing away. But look at everything that's still here. After the book ends, I have to keep living. That's how books work. We don't get to stay in them. We have to keep living our lives. So many wonderful things have happened because the book has touched people in ways I didn't think about as even being possible. When you write a book for yourself, you know, in some ways, I wrote the notes for myself and then the essays in the book, those I really think of as being for the reader. Those essays are really for other people and they're to give context to the quotes,

but also a way of me having a direct conversation with the reader about here are some things I've been through and here are some of the ways I reframed those experiences for myself and maybe thinking about them in this way will help you reframe something tough that you're going through too. I had somebody say to me yesterday about your book that she's dealing with something totally different, but she was like, it's helping me with emptiness syndrome. That makes a lot of sense, actually. Because I mean, all of our big life changes, when you really think about it, no matter what it is, they're all like identity issues, right? Like if you lose your job and so much of you was tied up in what you do for

a living, the question is, who am I? If your spouse leaves you, the question is like, who am I? If your kids move out and you've been actively invested in parenting on a daily basis, and that big part of your life is no longer there, who am I? I mean, I think so much of this, even though those things are all really different, they all put us in a place where we feel uncertain about the future and questioning who we are, what our role is, what our usefulness is, what's coming for us. And frankly, this year with the pandemic, I think we're all feeling a lot of those feelings because none of us are living the same lives that we lived a year ago. And some of those changes have been positive. And some of those changes have been negative. And again, it's the

and. That's right. Yeah. And back to that idea of when you were saying that even in the midst of what you were going through, it was helpful to look up at all the things you still did have. It's and. It's this part of my life is on fire and these other things are good. I find that word is so useful. It really can bring together things that we tend to get locked into one or the other. Or even, I think we sometimes lean toward but as if they're in opposition and not just naturally occurring together. It's not light but dark. It's light and dark. Like things, things are beautiful and terrible and lucky and unlucky at the same time. And always will be. Yeah. Yeah. I don't know anybody. Maybe I just know mostly ordinary people, but I don't know anybody whose life isn't, if we were to just sit down and

inventory it, that we wouldn't go good, good, good, good. I don't know about that. I wish that wasn't the same. Oh, good, good, good. Oh, nope. That's not so good. Like a cynical way of saying is it's always something. It's always something, right? But yes, it is. There's always something that's not the way you want it to be, but that's life. That's the way it is. And so which perspective do we want to look at? And that, even that statement is not either or. It's really being able to look at both right? Because there's always something is annoyed because the bad thing crops up. But what if when you get to see a beautiful sunset or your kid makes you something out of clay or a friend texts you that you haven't heard from in a while, what if that is also always something? The thing that when you're slipping a little bit in your day, something arrives to kind of like buoy you a while. What if that is also always something, you know, the thing that when you're, you're slipping a little bit in your day, something arrives to kind of like buoy you a little.

Yeah. I love that. I've recently started thinking about a little game called what's right, which is just sort of the opposite. Like we, you know, what's wrong. We know what's wrong. If I ask anybody in the world, what's wrong, they will be like, but we could ask the exact opposite question. What's right. And when I sit down and start just sort of playing that game, I'm just overwhelmed by it. Like, holy mackerel, there's so much that's right. Yep. And that's, that's the thing, like directing your attention toward that on a daily basis, the more right that you notice, I think the more it creates and it's sort of like this right begets right or hope begets hope kind of thing happens and it snowballs. And I realize that probably sounds

more Pollyanna than I want it to, but I honestly believe it, that the more you turn your attention toward the things that you have to be thankful for, the more you'll realize what's actually there. And it's just so easy when you're in a dark place to sort of get really claustrophobic and sort of myopic about what your life looks like and just to focus obsessively on the things that aren't going well. And whatever that thing is that's yelling the loudest is usually something negative. Yes. And then it colors everything. It just poisons everything. And so you could have a beautiful day and if one negative phone call happens or one terrible interaction or someone says something

snarky or you get some sort of professional disappointment, it just shuts everything else or you get some sort of professional disappointment, it just shuts everything else down into that grayscale space where before it was color. And I think we have to work actively to not let that happen. Yep. I certainly know I need to work actively not to let that happen. And I'm pretty certain anybody who's a fan of the One You Feed podcast also needs to actively work to not let that happen. There are probably lots of people out there that don't need to do that. There seem to be some people

who are just born with a sunny disposition, but I am not one of them. I'm not either. Let's talk about an idea in the book that you write about called The Future is Empty. As a Zen Buddhist, I always want to talk about emptiness. But the future is empty. As a Zen Buddhist, I always want to talk about emptiness. So, but the future is empty. Yeah. So, when my marriage ended, I suddenly felt like my future was wiped. You know, like a hard drive when suddenly like nothing's there anymore and you're thinking, where are my documents? They were just here. It felt like I had this whole written, planned out novel, you know, story. And then suddenly it was just gone. I'd lost it. And I didn't know where it had gone. And now what? And thinking about it more, I realized that it actually had never been written past the moment I was living.

that it actually had never been written past the moment I was living. And that we, I think, the way that we use pessimism sometimes as self-protection to sort of guard ourselves against getting our hopes up, I think we also use planning and projecting into the future as self-protection. Because if we think our life as it stands will just continue this way, and if we can plan the vacation next year, and if we know what professional projects are coming up in 2021, and if we, you know, know what our kids are going to be doing educationally next year, whatever the thing is, it gives us a feeling of control. But really, and if 2020 has taught us anything,

control but really and if 2020 has taught us anything it probably should be this we don't actually get to say what the future is going to be like um it's all it's just empty and we're making it up as we go and um i feel oftentimes like i'm sort of like paving a road like one step ahead of the step i'm walking yeah and that's as far as I get to pave it. And if I try to trick myself into thinking I'm paving a mile ahead, I'm just not because that's just not how it's at least not how I think life works. And so yeah, it actually was really comforting to think, oh, it had always been empty. All of the stuff I had been thinking was for sure, quote unquote, for sure, in the future really wasn't. And so my future now is no less empty than it was before. It just, the difference really is that that person is certainly not going

to be a part of it or will be, but not in the way that I had expected. And now I have to make it up as I go. Yeah, I absolutely love that idea. Just think of the future as empty. And you go on to describe sort of what you just said. And then you said, is this freeing or heartbreaking, comforting or terrifying? All of it all at once. And I think it's both. I often will do this with coaching clients is, you know, their brain will be telling them about how they're going to fail in the future. And I'm like, that voice doesn't know. Yeah. If that voice knows, if you've got a future predictor in your head that actually knows you should be betting on horses, not talking to me. That's a moneymaker right there. But assuming you don't have that,

to me. Yeah, that's a moneymaker right there. But assuming you don't have that, that voice doesn't know. Yeah. No, none of it knows. No, we don't. And that can be, again, depending on the perspective we're taking can be a really positive or comforting thought. But I think if we're locked into negative patterns, it can be really comforting to think, oh, yeah, the future is empty. It's not pre-written. No. And as many things can go right as can go wrong. And that's what I have to keep reminding myself. The future is empty. I'm making it up as I go. I don't know what will happen. Probably there will be some plot twists. Not all of them will be good. The past has told us that. If we're learning from the past to sort of project into our future, all that we know is that more change is coming because that's the one thing that we've been

able to count on in the past. It's that we don't know. And again, you know, sort of going back to what we were talking about earlier, I wouldn't have believed in my darkest moment that I would have been talking to you right now about this book or that this book would have existed or that I would have had any of the opportunities related to this that have happened this year. I couldn't have foreseen the worst parts of my life happening, but I also couldn't have foreseen the best parts of my life happening. That's just not how it works. You know, I talk about in the book, like we don't get to flip to the end to see what happens. It would be joyless if we could, but it's not on the menu. You know, talking to my daughter about that, like we don't know what's going to happen next.

But if we did, wouldn't that be boring? I mean, isn't part of what makes life interesting, free will, A, but B, also, just the adventure of it, which would be, you know, the knowing everything is a kind of death. It's a killer of hope and imagination and creativity and motivation if everything is preordained and set in stone for us, and we're just sort of rote, going through the motions, you know, filling a role. That's not authorship. if everything is preordained and set in stone for us, and we're just sort of rote, going through the motions, filling a role. That's not authorship.

Right. That doesn't excite me. I'm Jason Alexander. And I'm Peter Tilden. And together on the Really No Really podcast, our mission is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like why they refuse to make the bathroom door go all the way to the floor. We got the answer. Will space junk block your cell signal?

The astronaut who almost drowned during a spacewalk gives us the answer. We talk with the scientist who figured out if your dog truly loves you, and the one bringing back the woolly mammoth. Plus, does Tom Cruise really do his own stunts? His stuntman reveals the answer. And you never know who's going to drop by. Mr. Brian

Cranston is with us today. How are you, too? Hello, my friend. Wayne Knight about Jurassic Park. Wayne Knight, welcome to Really, No Really, sir. Bless you all. Hello, Newman. And you never know when Howie Mandel might just stop by to talk about judging. Really? That's the opening? Really, No Really.

No Really. Go to reallynoreally.com. And register to win $500, a guest spot on our podcast, or a limited edition signed Jason bobblehead. It's called Really, No Really, and you can find it on the iHeartRadio app on Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. I want to go back to the recovering pessimism for a second, because my question is, as you've become less pessimistic, more optimistic, has that crept into your poetry? I think it was creeping into my poetry before I even realized I was shifting. I mean, even the poem Good Bones, which people think of, I think, as being sort of dark.

It does say the world is more than half terrible. Ends on a hopeful note and a sort of call to action to make the world a more beautiful place. So I think I've always been sort of carrying the two things, the sort of light and the dark, the hope and the despair at the same time. I don't know that my poetry has changed greatly because of this new outlet or this new outlook because poetry is sort of a quiet, quiet place I go to. And so I'm certainly not writing suddenly cheerful poems about, you know, kittens and rainbows. I'm still using poetry for the most part to have a conversation with myself on paper. And often what drives me or motivates me to have a conversation with myself is puzzling over

something or processing something or sort of troubling over something or grappling with something. I think a poem of praise, another way of saying this is a poem of praise is I I'm not sure which it is, but it's really hard. I mean, it's really tough to express that without it being sappy or saccharine or yuck. So I'm always on the lookout for them. I sort of collect them in my own way, but they're harder to find. They are. I think maybe, and at least for me, if I'm really enjoying a moment in my day, I don't feel the need to write about it. I just want to live it. Yes. If I'm puzzling over something or sort of grappling with something, that is what drives me to want to sort of work out and problem solve it a little bit on the page. That's a different thing. If I'm just having a

good day, I don't even need to get out my pen. I just want to go have the good day. That's right. That's right. I think that is definitely part of it. And I think it is interesting to realize that because I think a lot of people will read an artist whose work is primarily what you might call darker and assume that that's that person in their entirety, which is certainly not the case. It's just that that's that person in their entirety, which is certainly not the case. It's just that that's where they go when they're in that place. And they have plenty, you know, plenty of other time that's not there. Yeah. It's always funny to me, you know, I haven't given a poetry reading in public and, you know, a year, but it's always funny to me when I give

poetry readings because people will come up to me afterwards and say, I didn't realize you were so funny. And it's because humor doesn't really come out in my poems. And so when I give a reading, I feel sort of self-conscious about reading sort of like a melancholy poem or an introspective poem after melancholy or introspective poem. And so my readings tend to be sort of self-deprecating stand-up, punctuated by poems that are slightly dark. And that's what makes it fun for me. But I think sometimes it's jarring for people who expect you in your lived life to be like the voice of your poems. And that, I think, is a mistake. I, in my lived life, am closer to the voice of your poems. And that I think is a mistake. I in my lived life, I'm closer to the voice in my essays, because I'm speaking as myself. So keep moving is a sort of a departure for me formally, because in books like Good Bones, the poems have speakers, and those speakers aren't necessarily me.

Even if it's first person, I, it's not Maggie. It's just a person speaking the poem. But in Keep Moving, I wrote it as myself. So the person who wrote those essays is the person that you could run into at Kroger. And that is also sort of a test of invulnerability. It's to write as yourself without any layers of persona or aesthetic distance that poetry provided. It provided some pretty good cover that I took for granted until I didn't have it anymore. Yeah, yeah. Would you like to read a poem for us? I'd be happy to. Do you have a request? Well, I gave you a couple I like, but I am open to whatever. If you got a rainbow and unicorn poem, now's the time to trot it out.

I'm not going to trot it out. Your new material. Speaking of darkness. Okay, no, I'm going to read one of the ones that you brought up. All right. And it actually has darkness in the title. And this poem, the title is a run-in, so it goes straight into the first sentence of the poem. At your age, I wore a darkness, several sizes too big. It hung on me like a mother's dress. Even now, as we speak, I am stitching a darkness you'll need to unravel, unraveling another you'll need to restitch.

What can I give you that you can keep? Once you asked, does the sky stop? It doesn't stop. It just stops being one thing and starts being another. Sometimes we hold hands and tip our heads way back so the blue fills our whole field of vision, so we feel like we're in it. We don't stop. We just stop being what we are and start being what? Where? What can I give you to carry there? These shadows of leaves, the lace in solace, this soft hand-me-down darkness. What can I give you that will be of use in your next life, the one you will live without me? I love that poem.

I love the lace in solace. I just love that you can look at the word solace and see the word lace inside of it. Well, you can. I can now. I can now. See, there's always something. But before I wouldn't have been able to see that. Yeah, I particularly enjoy reading your poetry too, because it has a real sense of place,

like a lot of good poetry does. And your sense of place is my place, because we both grew up in central Ohio. And so when you make specific references, I'm like, I've been there and there and there. And yes, that's the way this area looked when I was a child too. And so for me, it's particularly nice. I love that. Yeah. I think sometimes we think of setting as being something for fiction. Stories need to have a setting, But I think setting plays a really important part in my poems, probably because I still live in my hometown, more or less, and never really left. And so the streets and neighborhoods and houses and kinds of trees and kinds of birds and these

things, all of these landmarks are really important to me. Yeah. I think a lot of the poetry that I am particularly drawn to has maybe, I was going to say has a sense of place, but maybe I'm imbuing it with a sense of place. I don't know. I like that. We've got another of your little notes to yourself that I really liked. And it was, it is not enough to think positive, you have to do positive. Push hope from theory into practice. Do something today, however small, to light up your own life or shine on someone else. The light will reach you too. Keep moving.

Yeah. I mean, I think positive thinking always felt a little wishy-washy to me. I just kept thinking like, well, what does that do? It just didn't feel enough to think good thoughts. It reminds me of the old thoughts and prayers. Like we can't throw thoughts and prayers at things. We actually need action to help real people live their real lives. And when I was at my lowest, but frankly, today, every day, I need something more than good thoughts

to get through my day. I need good action. And it doesn't look the same every day. I don't mean like every day I'm doing volunteer work or every day is not some big thing. It just means like doing a good thing. Maybe it's calling a friend because you know, they were having a hard time a few days ago. And so you're remembering that and checking

in or feeling yourself kind of spiraling and knowing that probably you need to get out of your house and go take a walk. And maybe you could take your dog along and that would be doing your dog a solid too. You know, like it doesn't have to be a big thing. And that's something that's really helped me on a daily basis over the last couple of years is just trying to focus on what I can control because part of what put me in the bad place emotionally was feeling out of control, like feeling like I didn't get a say in the way that my life was changing. And so part of reframing that for myself is I can't always control the circumstances, but I can control how I think about them and how I react to them or don't.

think about them and how I react to them or don't. And so trying to be a little bit more mindful about those sorts of things and being more positive in my daily interactions with people, you know, I might be really tempted to reply to snark with snark, but I could also just be the bigger person and have some integrity and let it go. For example, you know, or if somebody does something that makes me unhappy, I can't change what the person did. I just can only control my own actions. And sometimes it is frankly exhausting trying to be the bigger person. I don't always like it because sometimes it's really satisfying to be reactive, right? Sometimes it feels really good in the moment to do the wrong thing, but it doesn't pay dividends. It never feels good in the long run to have done the wrong thing. If you have a conscience, it will come back

and it will bother you and you will think about it and you will realize that you were widening the gap between the person that you want to be and the person you were in that moment. That's not good. And so I'm always trying to sort of do things that would make future me proud of present me. Yes. You know? And, you know, future me is really glad I ordered six pints of Jenny's ice cream to be delivered last week. And I think future me will also be pleased with how I managed a difficult situation this morning. And so I'm always trying to sort of, even though the future is empty, I know future me will be there.

I hope she'll be there. And I'm hoping, I'm trying to do my best for her as much as I can. Yes, there's that funny Simpsons thing. And I was not really a Simpsons guy. But you know, the future Homer, I feel really bad for that guy. No kidding. Right. I feel bad for present Homer. Yeah, I mean, really present Homer is in trouble also. Yeah. And listeners of the show won't be surprised that I picked that piece out given how frequently I trot out this phrase that I heard originally in AA, which is sometimes you can't think your way into good action. You have to act your way into good thinking. Oh, I like that. So fundamental

to my approach to life that anytime anybody writes anything like that, I end up bringing it out of the book. All right. One last thing, and then we're going to wrap up, which is, I don't know if I'm going to pronounce this right, but can you tell us about serotoninous pine cones? You did pronounce it right. Yeah. So I know I love that word. So serotoninous pine cones of certain trees that are sealed really tightly with this thick layer of resin. And they require forest fires to open and then spread their seeds. So even a little bit of fire isn't enough to do it. They actually need what we would consider to be a catastrophic event in order to live and thrive and grow. And so I've been watching a nature documentary, as I often do with my kids, because it's one of the things that we can all agree on. They're really partial to

Attenborough narration. When there's a different narrator, they get very cranky because it doesn't have the same quality of his voice. But yeah, so we watched a documentary once about these trees. And we got to watch the fire and then watch the slow-mo of the cones opening and then watching in these charred spaces that looks like nothing could possibly ever grow there again. These new trees grow. Jack pines is one of them. Lodgepole pines is another one. I loved that idea. The fact that you might have to go through, like you were saying earlier, have to go through, like you were saying earlier, a catastrophic event to get to a place where you can grow that idea of post traumatic growth, that maybe, even if it's an unwelcome change, even if it's not something you would have ever wished on yourself or your family. Maybe somehow it makes that level of fire is what makes it possible for you to grow and become a different kind of person and maybe a better kind of person even than you were in the

life that you got to live before. And thinking about that metaphor helped me through that time because I thought maybe something's happening here and I can't see it yet. There are inner workings that I am not yet privy to. And I just have to trust that the person who emerges on the other side of this seemingly catastrophic event will be someone worth being and worth knowing. I won't know what it's going to be. I still really don't know what it's going to be. I mean, I'm living in the after, but it's not really the after. The after is continuing, right? Yeah, it's just now. Yep, it's just now.

Yeah, I love that idea of the pine cones. A, because nature amazes me. How could that even be? Yeah. And B, it's a great metaphor for personal transformation. And C, we've had an awful lot of forest fires this year, and it's at least marginally comforting to know that nature knows what to do with that, and even part of nature is designed for that. Yes, part of nature is specifically designed for that. Seems wild to me. Like, wouldn't we have evolved to a place where that wasn't necessary? The answer apparently is no. And I think maybe for us too, the answer is no. Like we, maybe we still need these shakeups.

The snow globe still needs to be picked up and shaken really hard sometimes for us to make breakthroughs in our lives. Yep, I think so. All right, well, that is where we are going to wrap up. You and I will continue in the post-show conversation. I may lean on you for another poem in there. And listeners, if you're interested in post-show conversations, ad-free episodes, and all sorts of other good stuff, you can go to oneufeed.net slash join. Maggie, thank you so much for coming on. It was such a pleasure to have you on. I really enjoyed the book, and I was so happy to have you on. I had dreamt that you and I would do this in person as a gathering in Columbus, Ohio, an event. And finally, it was like, well, who knows when that could ever occur. So here we are.

Let's just say sometime in the future, it'll be possible. It will be. It'll be possible. Thank you. If what you just heard was helpful to you, please consider making a monthly donation to support the One You Feed podcast. When you join our membership community with this monthly pledge, you get lots of exclusive members-only benefits. It's our way of saying thank you for your support. Now, we are so grateful for

the members of our community. We wouldn't be able to do what we do without their support, and we don't take a single dollar for granted. To learn more, make a donation at any level, and become a member of the One You Feed community, go to oneyoufeed.net slash join. The One You Feed podcast would like to sincerely thank our sponsors for supporting the show. I'm Jason Alexander. And I'm Peter Tilden. And together, our mission on the Really No Really podcast is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like why the bathroom door doesn't go all the way to the floor, what's in the museum of failure, and does your dog truly love you? We have the answer. Go to reallynoreally.com.

And register to win $500, a guest spot on our podcast, or a limited edition signed Jason bobblehead. The Really No Really podcast. Follow us on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.