Welcome to the Gathering Pod, the audio version of my weekly gathering room broadcast. I'm Martha Beck.

So let's get started on today's topic. It is a strange topic. And I got the title from a two-year-old.

We were worried about something. She wasn't feeling well. We were worried,

how do we get our work done, take her to the doctor? How do we, like, what if she can,

nobody can babysit, what are we going to do? And suddenly this baby hand went up and said,

she said, calm down. We can do both. Calm down. We can do both. And we'd say, okay, thank you,

Lila. Thank you for your input. Now, what are we actually going to do? And she kept saying,

calm down. We can do both. I don't know who said that to her recently, but it made a very deep

impression to the point where any anytime people seem at all troubled,

she now holds out that oracular hand and says, calm down, we can do both. So we all started to

laugh about it. And I started thinking, you know, I spent my whole life coaching career basically

saying, calm down, we can do both. People come in and they've got

all kinds of blind spots and heartaches. And it's usually because they think they have to choose

between different aspects of themselves, different things they love, different people they love.

And the culture tells them the two can't coexist. And so I sit there and say, oh, this is a Rosarian false dichotomy or this is

polarization of parts within the psychological system or whatever. It boils down to calm down.

We can do both. So people come in and they say, I want to love my life, but also pay my rent.

Calm down. We can do both. I want to be super mature, but also pay my rent. Calm down. We can do both.

I want to be super mature, but also childlike.

Calm down, we can be both.

I want to travel, but I'm also a homebody.

I just don't wanna leave.

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