What really I was looking for was like, who is the person I am now? How was she created? And how we're kind of coming to terms with all of that? Help me move forward? How does reckoning with the past help us understand the present? 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. Thanks for joining us. Our guest on this
episode is our friend and the poet Maggie Smith. She's the author of several books, including Good Bones and the national bestsellers Golden Rod and Keep Moving Notes on loss, creativity, and change. Maggie's poems and essays have appeared in the New York Times, The New Yorker, Poetry, The Nation, and many other publications, and her poem good Bones went viral internationally and since then has been translated into nearly a
dozen languages and featured on the CBS primetime drama Madam Secretary. Today, Maggie, Eric and Jinny discuss her new book, You Could Make This Place Beautiful, a memoir. Hi, Maggie walk into the show. Oh, thanks for having me. Hello Jinny, Hello Hairic, Hello man. So this will be a three person conversation. We have Maggie back on. We're going to be discussing her new memoir You Could Make This Place Beautiful. Before we do that, we'll start like we always do, with the parable Jinny.
Would you like to do it? Oh? Sure, yeah, okay, So Maggie. There was a grandparent talking with their grandchild and they said, in life, there are two wolves inside of us who are always at battle. One is a good wolf who represents things like kindness and bravery and love, and one is a bad wolf that represents things like greed and hatred and fear. And the grandchild stops and thinks and looks up at their grandparent and say, well, grandparent,
which one wins? And the grandparents says the one you feed. So how does that parable apply to you in your life and in your work? At this point, I feel like I should have cheated and listened to my earlier responses to this question and then improved upon my earlier
responses to this question. You know, I think for me it comes down a lot to choice and intention, right, because I mean, as we were talking before we started recording, there are always going to be things like anger, or a sense of injustice, or a sense of being wronged, or things not turning out the way we had hoped. And those things are all valid and real and we can't just sort of box them up and put them away.
But what gets more time, space, power, momentum energy, to me has to be the desire for peace more than
the desire to wage war. And so that's sort of where I'm at right now, both with my writing and that this book, and with my living and my parenting, is how can I sort of put peace for myself and my kids at the front of my decision making, and then how can I make sure that the things I'm doing a line that right, And if I keep that in mind, I won't always succeed, but I think I can help myself from failing too often and slipping
into negative patterns. So I have a follow up question to your answer, because something you said really struck me and I was wondering if you would elaborate a little bit on it. So you said you're prioritizing or choosing peace for you for your kids. What does peace look like or feel like or mean right now to you? Guys?
Calm you know, I mean it, peace sounds kind of boring, like it doesn't sound as energetic as joy, for example, peace, But it's the thing I wish for on sort of every wish, like every eleven eleven, every little piece of dandelion fluff, every one, two, three, four on the digital clock.
Like peace is what I'm looking for, and probably more than joy, just that sense of like even keeled living, you know, having gone through so much upheaval between the divorce and the pandemic, what I'm really wanting to offer them in particular is a real sense of stability and yeah, and just like a soft place to just land and be.
And I need that too, I mean, I guess I'm saying, I offer that to them, and this would be the place where if my therapist we're also on this podcast, she would jump in and say, don't forget that you also live in your house. Yeah yeah, yeah, like you are a person living in the house too. You are not just the sort of like distant overseer of others lives.
It's you two. Yeah, yeah, it's interesting. I was listening to an interview yesterday Brene Brown was talking, and she was just reflecting on how we have the ordinary moments as kind of a steady diet until life throws us a curveball and the apple carts turned over and everything is chaotic, and then all we want it's like ordinary moments again, sort of that like you're saying, what I feel like you're saying, is that piece that stability, that rhythm,
that calm, and that feels like such an oasis. Oh my gosh. Yeah, just to have no news, yes, you know, to be able to go five days without talking to someone and not have a lot of updates, that would be really nice, yea. Yeah, yeah, peace sounds boring until you've been at war. Exactly exactly as we were talking, I was thinking a little bit about this question I'm always interested in, which is relating to difficult emotions and this sort of thing and trying to choose peace over conflict.
Although in a divorce, which is what much of this memoir is about, there is a certain amount of inevitable conflict that's in there, and so striking that balance of like, all right, how do I defend what needs defended? How do I take care of what needs taken care of? How do I allow myself to feel the natural emotions that are coming up? Right? We don't want to squelch
our emotions and orient towards a more peaceful state. And that's a lot of juggling going on there, Right, That's a lot of juggling, which is why I think these things can be so very difficult. Yeah, it is a lot of juggling. I think in some ways for me, mine need to understand things in order to set them down. You know, I have this sort of real analytical bent
to me that doesn't always serve me well. The need to know, the need to figure it out, the need to solve is a lot of what drove me to write this book, and a lot of sort of managing all of that conflicting emotion and needing desperately to be able to set a lot of it down. And that's what the book sort of allowed me to do, is like, Okay,
it can live in here now. It's interesting you say that because one of the things that really struck me as I read You're absolutely beautiful, beautifully written, beautifully honest memoir is sprinkled throughout because it's so interesting the way you sort of organize and structure this memoir. It's unconventional in terms of the other memoirs I've written, and I
really liked it. But you say, periodically throughout you have a page that will say A friend says, every book begins with an unanswerable question, and then it'll lists a question right that you seem to have pondered upon. And the book has many of these kind of inserted throughout. And so I wonder, are these questions ultimately unanswerable to you? I mean I sense your writing as an attempt to sort of answer them. I mean, do you answer them
for yourself? I think the answers keep changing. That's the other slippery part of this is a question like how do you heal? Is in some ways unanswerable and in other ways, it's answerable differently every single day, because what is required of you or what feels good or what would help you in that moment is not necessarily what you needed the week before, the month before. So I
don't know that they're sort of ultimately existentially unanswerable. It's just that there isn't a neat response that would encapsulate everything for all of those questions. It's interesting. When I wrote the first draft of this book, there was just one chapter that was a list of all the questions.
It was just one chapter. All the questions were listed at one time, and then through the editing process, we realized that we thought it would be more impactful to spread them out, so that the sort of text leading into the question and then whatever was going to follow a sort of ping off of those things. And it gave me more kind of touch points to reflect on in the book by spreading them out. And I don't know. I think there are certain days where some of those
questions feel like they have clearer answers than others. What does the rilca live the questions? Now, that's part of the comfort that you have to get to. I think when going through any kind of being change in life is like not expecting answers because they're not necessarily owed to you. Yeah, you know, yeah, as frustrating as that can be, Like does life owe me answers to these questions? No? No, not really, like I can do my best with them.
But a lot of it is like accepting that life is like a que and a very heavy on the queue, very light, frustratingly light on the a yep yep. Yeah, And sometimes that's what the writing's for. Yeah, And it does seem that those questions, some of them, may have felt unanswerable in the moment when originally posed, and later on there is some sort of answer, even if that answer is just your life becomes the answer to that question. But I love what you say that those answers are
always changing, you know. How do you heal? I mean that is such a individual question, Like there's no right answer that we could say, like, oh, here's how you heal? Like who are you? What are you going through? What have you done before? I mean, there's so many variables
that go into these things. And then, like you said, what I need now may not be what I needed three months ago, which is a little bit frustrating sometimes when you feel like I've found this thing that really works for me, and then it doesn't anymore, and what you need is something different, and that tends to keep us on our toes. Yeah, well it's funny. I mean, just even talking about anger and negative emotions. I think
I needed my anger for a time. You know. It felt almost protective for a while, because if you're angry, you're not sad, right. I don't know. I don't know how it creates that little barrier, but that's my experience. And then it stops serving me. Yes, and I needed to put that down and just let myself be sad, you know. And that didn't feel great, but it's what I needed. And I think what ultimately made whatever healing has been possible possible was not getting stuck in that. Yeah,
keep moving as someone might. Oh my gosh, it's a great theme. You begin this memoir with a quote that has lodged itself in my heart and in my mind. I've carried it with me since reading it, and I just wanted to revisit it now. You begin with this beautiful quote by Emily Dickinson. It says, I am out with lanterns looking for myself. I just have this image
and tell me if I'm off. But the events during the memoir were happening where you were looking for yourself, and then the writing of this book was another iteration of you looking for yourself through the writing of this And you go on to say, but here's the thing about carrying light with you no matter where you go, and no matter what you find or don't find, you change the darkness. Just by entering it. You clear a path through. Tell me more about that and what that
means to you. I think Keep Moving as a book was really about pressing forward out of necessity, like I had to tell myself positive truths every day to sort of move, And this book was more a kind of reckoning with the past, and for me, it was mostly about my divorce, sort of getting to answer that question. I mean, who doesn't quote David Byrne on a daily basis,
like how did I get here? You know that moment when you wake up and you're like, this is not my beautiful life, this is not my this, this is not my that. Just that feeling that I think a lot of us have, particularly in midlife, where we have a moment and the moment is or the invitation is sort of created by some sort of breakage, right, because if life we're going fine, probably wouldn't have that panic
moment where you thought, how did I get here? So whatever rupture happens, you know, losing someone close to you or losing your job, or having something happen to a relationship you're in, creates this like need to reflect and look back on all of the paths, roads taken, roads not taken, choices made, choices not made that led you to that place, and so sort of like traveling back into the dark to figure out kind of how did I get here? How is this my life? How am
I in this space? I had to take my Emily Dickinson poetry lantern with me to kind of light at least the few steps in front of me that I could light, because what I was looking for was answers I think to how my life turned out in a way that I hadn't expected and didn't see coming. But what really I was looking for was like, who is the person I am now? How was she created? And how we'll kind of coming to terms with all of
that help me move forward? How does reckoning with the past help us understand the present and then feel a little bit more confident moving into the future because we know ourselves. If you don't know yourself, I don't know how you keep going. It's very confusing. Yeah, I mean I love that line. You change the darkness just by entering it. You clear a path through. And that goes back to I think unanswerable questions, meaning that it's the
act of asking them that clears the path. Right. Yeah, you want to get to an answer, but the questioning is what being able to look at it this way and let me turn it over and look at it that way, and what if I thought about it that way. That's what, at least for me, clears a path through. Is being willing to take the time and have the courage to ask the questions. Oh yeah, I love that
you have a lot of poet in you, Eric. I love that that sort of like idea of holding a many faceted thing and looking at it from different dimensions and looking at all the different sides of it. I think for me, that's what this book project was like, because I've never really written about my whole life. And I don't mean like from birth to present. I mean my parenting life, my work life, my writing life, my life as a friend, my life as a daughter, as
a sister, as a wife, as an ex wife. And there was something about writing this whole book that encouraged me to see the connections and sort of touch points between those facets that might be living on the other side of the object. Right. But it's almost like when you visit a place, you don't necessarily have the frame of reference for where you're visiting, but if you look at that place on a map and you can get the perspective of, oh, my gosh, I was in France.
That's very close to Switzerland. You know, I have no idea where I was when I was there. And something about the whole book project, of working on something of this size really just sort of invited me to see how different parts of my life were related and interconnected in a way that I don't think I would have been able to sort of shine light on those things if I hadn't approached all of this and sort of one fell swoop. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense.
It's so interesting to me that it's actually fascinating that I can sometimes open my mouth and say something or bring pen to paper and write something that I've never thought before. It just comes out, you know. It comes out in the writing, it comes out in the talking. And unless we engage with a medium like either one of those or something else, you know, for that matter, it might be unexplored darkness that we just didn't even
realize that corner was there. You know. So the benefit to writing this menimoir for you is something we've just explored. But you say, the question I keep asking myself as I write this book, the question I keep insisting upon, is this, how can this story, this experience be useful to anyone other than me? How can I make this material into a tool that you can use to play Devil's advocate. Experience is instructive, you say. People make connections
on their own right. So I think it's really interesting because I certainly did. As I read your book, read about this divorce, read about your experience. Throughout I had moments of my own where the way you languaged something unlocked and showed me something in my own life that I had not seen that way before. I will pause for a moment before diving into one such example, but I just want you to know it truly is instructive people do make these connections. It really is so useful.
Oh I love that. I mean, now I think about having that desperate need to want the book to be useful, and I think about it, and I think, okay, So underlying that desire is I think probably something that a lot of people who write about their lives feel, which is, who else cares? How is it not merely self indulgent?
The desire to make it useful for the reader also, I think comes from a place of really questioning and wondering how to justify the kind of project that is writing about your single, solitary minuscule in the grand scheme
of things life. And so it means a lot to hear that, because I think if it makes maybe one person even feel less alone or seen, or it resonates in some way, or calls something up or helps them figure something out for themselves, or you know, whatever that touch point is, I guess then the book has sort of done its job if it has one. Did you ever, or do you ask the same question about poems? I'm curious no about the need for them to be useful, And I'm just kind of curious, are they self evidently
useful or that's not the point. Yeah, I don't think it's the point, And I actually don't think it's the point of memoir either, which is why I think it's sort of funny. Like I don't think literature in general needs to have a job other than just being itself. And it just gets sent out into the world and then received, and it's kind of none of my business what the receiver receives, right, I know what I've sent, but what you receive, that's between you and the text.
It's not really even between you and me. It's between you and the text. And I think I was considering this book in a new way because there's so much of me in the text in a way that there hasn't been in my poems or even and keep Moving. There's very little artistic distance in this book, and so it just felt more vulnerable in that way. But no, I mean, poems don't have jobs. Poems just get to
be poems like kids. Yeah, like kids. Yeah, the palms are freeloaders also, just like the children, they just get to live, be cared for, be tended to, and no one needs them to do much. I suppose that depends on where you happen to be a kid in the world and what time frame. Yeah, if I can get them to take out the recycling, it's a win. Well, I'm wrestling with whether I even share them, Like how one of your stories sort of applied to me maybe just between me and the text. I wonder if there's
any need to share it. That's the whole point of this podcast, I think. Okay, So then does the answer yeah? Carry on? So I just I think so, yeah, unless Maggie wants to veto that's true, of course I wouldn't. Okay, all right, So here I'm just gonna read a little section here says when Violet woke up that morning, she came downstairs into the kitchen where I was standing at
the counter making a poor over. She handed me a piece of paper about my mom Q and an her teacher had given out to the whole class for Mother's Day. The question was, what has your mother taught you to be optimistic? Violethood written optimistic. To say I was surprised would be an understatement. It had been a brutal eleven months for me, for all of us, that my daughter had witnessed me struggling for months and saw hope there was no better gift. Well, what that interestingly unlocked inside
of me? I remember before my mom was diagnosed with Alzheimer's, I saw changes in her. She and my dad were divorcing, and so I was at lunch one day with my dad and I just said to him, you know, I just didn't realize how negative Mom was, like, She's just
so cynical and critical. And he says, she's been like that for a long time, And I thought, huh, Because when I look back and I look back at my childhood, the mother I remember some of the characteristics she cultivated in me, by example, was optimism, encouragement, just all kinds of positivity and love and kind of always pointing towards the opportunity, not the flaw in things right. And that's
how I thought of my mother. Now, I do think some of the disease of Alzheimer's was causing her to become more negative and cynicals, So I do think that
would played the role. But I also realized that through this when I was a young child, my mom was going through a very difficult time, and I think what she was doing for me was giving me those things as an intentional gift right to orient that way towards me, and I didn't realize it at the time, you know, I didn't realize that she was probably wanting not for me to see her sadness, not for me to see, you know, all of the despair, all of the struggle,
you know, and she succeeded. And it's just so interesting because I saw some of that in your story in Violet, maybe the way she experienced you as a child. I received that as a gift, you know, and I hope that Violet can take some of that too with her from this experience. I love them that. I mean, I think it is an offering, right like frame of mind, Yeah, is an offering. I love that story. So I wanted to talk a little bit about the nature of trying to write a book like this or really look at
our lives clearly anyway. And you say this isn't a tell all because all is something we can't access, we don't get all. Some, yes, most, if we're lucky, all know. And then also at another time you say, there's no such thing as a tell all, only a tell some, a tell most. Maybe this is a tell mine, And
the mind keeps changing because I keep changing. The mind is slippery like that, And I just love this idea of recognizing that anything we are saying is again back to that it has a perspective to it as a lens we're looking through, and that lens is always changing, you know, I'm always changing. The way I feel about a certain aspect of my past can look very different one year to the next to the next. The event didn't necessarily change, well, it didn't change either I remember
it differently or I relate to it differently. So there's just this sense that I just loved the naming of the slipperiness of all that. Yeah. I mean, I think there are a couple of places in the book where I just actually say, like on second thought, or I get to a different realization about something by the last third of the book, and I feel differently, yeah, than I do in the first third. And it's not because anything is any quote different. It's because I'm different and
my perspective on it is different. I'm answering the questions
for myself in a different way. I mean, we're not static, right, And that's the tricky thing about about committing anything to the page is that even as this book ended, the life continued, right, So even it's a sliver, right, it's a time capsule in itself of these events, but also how I felt and processed them in a very specific, you know, two or three year period of time as I was writing it, and in ten years while I feel very differently about some of this, maybe right the
book stops and the life doesn't. If we're lucky, Yeah, And it's a beautiful testimony that we are always changing, because I think for me and for many when we're in the thick of a difficult time, the tendency is to say it's always going to be away, it's always going to feel this way, I'm never going to feel better. And this is such a beautiful reminder that we don't know how you're going to feel, but you'll feel differently,
you will feel different, you know. Yeah, ideally, ideally, right, ideally, And I think that gets to being willing to ask the difficult questions, you know, because whether it's about this situation, about all situations in general, that's how change happens. I think if we stop questioning and we don't recognize that this is a tell mine, you know, we then start to think we know the answer, and once we think we really know the answer, I think that's how humans
get stuck, you know. And I can look at people in my life who are older than me who think about, say a situation that happened to them thirty years ago, the same way they thought about it then, and to me, that's not ideal. Right, Like, I'm hoping that as I grow and change, I'm able to say, like, oh, yeah, you know, I see some things there that I didn't see before I had blind spot there I didn't see,
or now I understand why she did that. And so I think that being willing to ask the questions is part of what does what you're saying, Jenny is, which is that things change. Yeah, you know, it's not just time. Time is part of it. And it's interesting to see the book unfold because as time goes on, you start to heal, and time I think has an element of healing in it, but I think it can be much accelerated by the questioning. Yeah, time plus curiosity, time plus
action kindness. Yeah, yes, oh my gosh, curiosity, that's huge. I mean, I think that's really the sort of spirit that I entered the book with was a spirit of curiosity, like a seeking spirit, which is probably where that epigraph really comes from. So I knew if I approached even this sort of difficult subject matter with a spirit of sort of empathy and curiosity and flexibility and open mindedness
and also just self forgiveness. Yeah, even that, I probably would be on the right path with the writing of it, as opposed to like if I had gone down the path of writing this book with the opposite all those things, Like, I know it's right, I know what happened. My way is the way. Yeah, I'm good and these people are bad. I mean, there are ways to approach a situation that I think will put you in a stuck place even
over time. Yes, because you are so committed to your story, your version, whatever that thing is, and staying open and curious about it, I think is the way to like not get in that swamp. Yeah, as I reflect on that now that I hear you say that, I mean, did you at all contend with an inner critic or a self judgment and how did do you sort of meet that and work with that through the process of
writing this book and reflecting on your experience? Because what I come away with is not someone you know, beating themselves with a stick. I come away with someone gently and openly exploring what happened and what happened inside of me and around me. And that's beautiful and not necessarily my first inclination when I go to self examination. No, I mean, I definitely have an inner critic. She can
be loud. Quieting her can be an issue. And actually, I think that section you were talking about before, how can this book be useful? I think that's the inner critic talking. I think it's the critic that says, what right do you have? Why spend your time and energy doing this? Why tell this story? Why go there? Yeah? I think that is the inner critic kind of poking through, you know, peeking out from behind the curtain in that
part of the book. And I think some of the threads in the book about wondering about the questions that people will ask me about the book is sort of my way of trying to get ahead of both inner and outer critic. Like, yes, I anticipate the kind of pushback I might get both from myself and to others about writing this candidly about my experience, and so the
sort of more meta aspects of the book. I think, are me kind of contending with my inner critic and having a kind of conversation with myself on the page about like why are we doing this, Maggie, Yeah, what is the value in this? Like not just for you, but like what is the what is the purpose of this kind of writing? It's not a self help book, right, it's not poetry? So what is this project? Why does
it have value? That's the inner critic? Yeah. It makes me think of the Buddhist story of when the Buddha was enlightened. The night of his enlightenment, the last thing Mara sort of the shadow said to him was who do you think you are? Oh? Yeah, you know. It's that idea of like what right do you have to any of this that is one hundred percent it? Yeah? Yeah, oh the shadow. I love the idea of critic selfish shadow. Yeah. That actually, as a metaphor makes a lot of sense
to me. In a divorce, it's very easy for us to sort of see what the other person has done, and in some cases it's very obvious. You say, betrayal is neat because it preempts me from having to look really look at my marriage, and it caused me to reflect back on as I was joking before, said my first divorce, which then leads you to know that there
was a second one. So looking at my previous marriages, in both cases, in the first marriage there was an absolute betrayal of the sort that you describe, and in the second one person was much louder and much more angry than the other person. I was not the loud and angry one, as you might imagine, and that made it easy to say that the problem is there. The problem is you. You fell in love with someone else.
You are always angry. But that made my role so much more hidden and so much more subtle, but nonetheless still really there, right, I mean, still absolutely there, And I just love the nuance that you were taking and trying to question your role in it without taking too
much responsibility at the same time for someone else's behavior. Again, we're sort of juggling different things, right, because on one hand, it's like, well, I do want to understand what I contributed here, if for no other reasons, so I don't do it next time, right, And as a way of understanding why somebody might have acted the way they did, but without then suddenly going too far, the other way and saying well, they were right to act that way because I was X, Y and Z. I've sort of
skirted both those extremes before. Yeah, I mean, I think it's easy to fall into either blaming and finger pointing and making yourself the victim, or on the other hand, sort of justifying or excusing someone else's poor choices, and like in between, I think on the continuum in between those two things is the space in which you realize that all relationships work. Family, parent child, friendship, marriage, partnership.
These are all co created systems. And yes, you know, things can happen that are surprising, and things can happen that sort of blow everything up, right, Like, we can't always know what will happen, but there's still a whole lot going on besides any individual problem that did contribute, And so it was important to me to sort of be like, hey, also, I'm not perfect, wasn't perfect, will never be perfect. These are the ways in which I see now I contributed to that system and the way
that it looked. And here are the bits of my family life that I probably inherited from my parents because of the way the division of labor in my home. For example, between my parents and how I sort of recreated some of that in my home, and how it didn't serve me, but I didn't change it. A big part of this, I think, is like taking responsibility for
my part and only speaking for myself. Yeah, which ultimately is at least for me, has been an empowering thing to do because I then realize that what I contribute in future relationships can be different, and therefore I co create a different system that I'm not sort of victim
to another person's painful choices, do you suit? I mean, I mean not that that won't experience people that make painful choices that have impact on me, of course, but I have a power in the way I respond, and I do have choice in the way that I day to day meet that system I'm co creating. I think that's incredibly empowering. Yeah, it makes me think we are talking earlier about asking the questions about it, and by
doing that you remain unstuck. I think all these things are a way of taking the locus of control, such as it is, and putting it back inside us to some extent. It's not to say like, oh, I'm the whole problem. No, of course, not, as you said, co created. However, I can only change me. I can't change the other person if all the answers lie in the other person
and their behavior. Yeah, I'm kind of stuck. Yeah. And when I say I know people who are like thirty years later have the same relation to the other person is because they the whole problem was always in the other person. And if the problem is always outside on interpersonal things, right, the problem is always outside. We have very limited means with which to work with that. Yeah. And of course things then are just happening to you. Yeah, yeah, right.
I mean that's a really disempowering and frankly scary way to live, which is to just sort of perceive that things are by to happen to you and you desert at the mercy of everyone else's decision making. Where it's like, well, now, I see I could have done X, right, Not that I'm beating myself up about not doing X. Yes, I did the best that I could with the information I had in the person I was in that iteration of me,
I did the best I could. But with the information I have now, I probably would would do it differently. I would set a different boundary. I would ask for something else, I would speak up in a different way. I would be more assertive. I mean, it's really too bad we don't have the wisdom of middle age in our teens and twenties as it, truly, you know, when so many of us are making those decisions about how to live our lives and ways we think are permanent,
you know. I mean there are decisions I made in my twenties I really thought were permanent, that's it, decisions, you know. I'd sort of like frozen my life and time and I would just copy paste it, basically, you know, into infinity, and every year would pretty much look the same because I had decided what my life was going to be. And you know, some decisions cannot hold, should
not hold, We're not meant to hold, you know. I think about you know Pematrodren's difference between pain and suffering, right, Like, pain's not optional pain, we just have to like feel it. There we are. I would love to have some other multiple choice available to me, but pain is always going to be part of it. Actually, my therapist and I
decided that there is a multiple choice. It's you can feel pain, feel sad, and shame yourself for it and beat yourself up for it A or B. You can feel sad, feel pain and not beat yourself up about it. So I feel confident there actually is multiple choice there now has to do more with my reaction to it. But the suffering that's from the resistance to change and the refusal to accept that's a place of stuffness I
don't want to be in. Through the lens of mindfulness we talk about, there's the object of our attention, and then there's the relationship we have with it, the way we are in relationship to it, and that is where actually all of our experience with it lies, Like you said, the why me or the fighting it, and there may be a place for that, right and then there's also a place for moving towards acceptance or a wise action and a wise response, And however we meet it, that's
the experience we're going to have, by and large, you know, and that's kind of empowering. I think there's another framework that you describe in your memoir that was yet again another one that just I had this moment of like exactly that is it? Exactly you named it? And I'm wondering, do you have a copy of your book, Candy, Would you mind reading it? I can point you right to it because I just love hearing you read your work, as you read your poetry. It's been so beautiful. So
this is page twenty two. As you mentioned your twenty year old self. Okay, how I picture it? We are all nesting dolls, carrying the earlier iterations of ourselves inside. We carry the past inside us. We take ourselves, all
of ourselves wherever we go. Inside forty something me is the woman I was in my thirties, the woman I was in my twenties, the teenager I was, the child I was inside, divorced me, married me, the me who loved my husband, the me who believed what we had was a revocable and permanent, the me who believed in permanence. I still carry these versions of myself. It's a kind of reincarnation without death, all these different lives. We get
to live in this one body as ourselves. Ah. Yes, you were the first person to ever language it like that. It's so true. I always feel like little me is still there inside of me. Yeah, and you're right, we carry all of them with us. What a beautiful way to integrate the lives we live. I've been thinking about integration a lot, so I love that, And to me, it's sort of like the same thing we do when we revise a piece of writing and then save a new version. I never save over right, Like I never
replace one version with the new version. I always saved the old draft because I want to see where I was before. I want to be able to follow the breadcrumb trail back and see each iteration of that poem or essay. And I kind of think of us like that too, you know, when we hid a new birthday, we're not saving over all of the other drafts of us.
I think of them as nesting dolls, like those Russian Matroiska dolls, because it's like it's all in there, and somehow it's just impossibly elastic that we're able to carry all of these versions of ourselves with us all the time, and all of these memories and all of these different ways of being all at the same time. It seems impossible, you know, it's a kind of multiverse. It seems impossible,
and yet that's just how we live. Yeah. Yeah, And I love the word carrying because the way you say it evoked in me this Tenderness that it's almost like I'm carrying the younger versions of me a maternal way. It's in a loving way. It's a bringing you with me gently. I'm trying to cultivate more of that energy in the way I relate to myself. I love that you read Tenderness and that someone asked recently, if you could go back and revise a poem from a published
book from twenty years ago, would you do it? And I said no, And if I think I would write the poem differently now that poem is a record of the writer and the person I was then, right, And I don't want to erase her by erasing her choices and how she wrote that poem. Again, it's we're not auto saving, like we're carrying all of it along. That's important to me. Let's talk a little bit about another thing that comes up in the book a number of times,
which is the idea of forgiveness. And you say in the book, my aspiration is to forgive, you know, you say, by the time these pages are printed, by the time you're reading this, may I be in a place of forgiveness. And I was just thinking about that, and I was also thinking about like, we've had a couple of people on and we've done episodes on forgiveness, and we've talked about how one of the hardest things in the world
to do is forgive someone who's not sorry. And so I'm curious for you, as you continue to have an aspiration towards forgiveness, do you feel like you're making progress on that And do you feel like there is a part of you, a place in you that is afraid to forgive or doesn't think that forgiveness is wise at the current moment for any number of different reasons. If I'm teasing too much out about your current situation, you
can kick this question down the road. No, you know, I think I have a complicated relationship with forgiveness, which is why I think I was writing that aspirationally, and I think where I landed was acceptance, which feels I don't know how you feel about this, but it feels somewhat different to me, Like I don't know about the Dictionary definition of acceptance versus forgiveness, but I think they do feel kind of texturally and qualitatively different to me.
So perhaps the short answer is, I think I've got myself to a place of acceptance where I'm not in a place of like struggling and pushing back against what is, and I'm not blaming myself, but I'm also not blaming others like I'm in I think a sort of like as peaceful as I can be neutral space about that, you know, because what I'm seeking is peace. But forgiveness still feels still slightly like my fingers can't quite touch
it for some of the reasons you're describing. Yeah, if you have any wisdom to share there, I am all ears. I don't know that I do. I do think we touched on this a little bit earlier, I think in this conversation, or I can't remember, maybe we touched on
in our a few minutes beforehand. But the idea of when we really recognize what anger or hate can be doing to us, right, for me, that was a fundamental step on at least getting to the aspiration for forgiveness, where I went like, oh, I see, like another old Buddhist story says, resentment is like holding onto hot coals you know, the other person isn't getting burned, you know, or which we used to say in AA, it's like drinking poison and waiting for the other person to die,
you know, so you get this sense like, oh, okay, well this is only hurting me, And yet I do think you're right. There is a place I think between forgiveness, which I've experienced for some people who have harmed me in the past true forgiveness. It feels like I have extreme warmth towards them when I think about the situation. It doesn't cause me any distress. It's just kind of over have they apologized they have in those cases, yeah,
or at least recognized we co created a situation. But then I think of other situations where I don't think that I'm there. Where I don't want to be is I don't want them occupying a bunch of space in my brain all the time. And so that does seem to be a little bit of the acceptance piece. It's, you know, sort of like, Okay, I've got to find a way to turn the temperature on this whole thing down, take them from occupying fifty percent of my mental energy
to three percent of my mental energy. But I wouldn't say that I necessarily feel feelings of warmth in my heart towards that person. And I've sort of started to accept that in certain cases, particularly if the harm is ongoing, that that might be just about as far as is reasonable to go. Yeah, at least for me. I think
that seems reasonable to me too, and also self protective. Yeah, and not in a sort of like guarded, overreaching way, but in a really reasonable, boundaried way, which is like, I respect myself enough that I'm going to keep this distance and it might not ever be warm, right. I've never thought about warmth and forgiveness is sort of traveling together. And I find that interesting because I do think that's clarifying.
If it's impossible for you to think about having warm feelings towards someone, you're probably not in a place of forgiveness with them, yeah, But you might be in a place of acceptance without warm feelings. I love that you brought the word acceptance into the forgiveness conversation, because as I think about a relationship where there is well, let me say, there has been an apology, but there is
no change in behavior. With my sisters really ongoing, long, painful, difficult relationship, I think lately what I have been able to find is accepting of who she is, not that I want her in my life. I have a maximum sympathy, minimum contact scenario with her, Like, the boundary is there.
But in terms of how I can have peace up in my own head in my heart about the situation, I've just sort of accepted this is who she is telling me she is through her actions repeatedly, and so I am going to accept that, as opposed to constantly in my head wishing she was different, wanting her to be different, arguing she should be different talking. You know, It's like, and it's interesting because I just Instagram. I
started following this woman, doctor Caroline Leaf. She had a post recently that said, you can't hurt others with your thoughts, only yourself, And I was like, oh, so all of these arguments I'm having with her in my head, all of this is only corroding my own brain, you know that. So if I can just you know, quit being surprised that a snake has bitten me they are a snake if they tend to do that, and just accept that's who she is, and quit walking in paths riddled with snakes.
If I can, then I can have some peace. Yeah, realistic expectations I think are important, and also having a real sort of heart to heart with this self about what the people in your life are capable of. Yeah, exactly, Like, this is what this person is capable of, Like, this is what they have to offer, this is what they're bringing to this co created system, And so I have to behave accordingly. And I can't make them different. I can't make them show up in a different way. I
can't make them capable of what I think they should. Yeah, be capable, you know, the realistic expectations piece of like acceptance is big. Yeah, the piece that comes with that is huge. I mean for me, since I had that realization about my sister, I have spent so much last time, very little time at war in my head with her. Yeah, and it's just it's like liberating. Yeah. I think that
capacity thing is a really important one. When I think that somebody should change, or more importantly, could change, I'm then very troubled. If on the other hand, it was like with Jinny's mom, there became a point with Alzheimer's I went like, she can't it can't happen, she can't do differently than this. In that moment, it became incredibly easy to be like, well, that's the way she is
that's because she can't not be Yeah. Right, But that extends further than we might often think it does with people at the very least with a capacity to not want to change. I mean, one of my favorite quotes that I use on this show over and over again is when you realize how difficult it is to change yourself, you realize the near impossibility of changing anyone else. And I just love that because it really puts it in
perspective for me. I'm like, yeah, you're right, I've got my hands full trying to like with me here, Like, I'm not going to get someone else to do it, particularly they don't want to do it. Yeah, I'm going to mind my own side of the street as best as I can. And yeah, yeah, yeah, Well, Maggie, thank you so much. We both loved the book. We love talking to you as always, and thank you so much for this generous and fun conversation. Yeah, thank you, Maggie.
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