Welcome to the Gathering Room podcast, the audio version of my weekly gathering room broadcast.

I'm Martha Beck. Today, I'm talking about something that I've been writing about.

That's what you hear every single day these days days because I've been writing for a season.

This is something I wrote about long ago and it has to do with the way people find their passions

and their purpose. The way I'm looking at this nowadays is that the reason so many people

don't seem to know their passion and their purpose,

like maybe y'all know, maybe you have a complete bull's eye picture of your purpose in life

and you're just headed straight toward it. There are people like that. But it's very rare.

And here's why I think it's so rare. I think it's because we live in a culture dominated by

left hemisphere thinking and that type of thinking gets very, it pulls us toward anxiety and it also

has the odd characteristic of, I've told you this before, being unable to see anything other than its own point of view.

So people who have left hemisphere, no, right hemisphere struck.

So they're only thinking with their left hemispheres, they can't even see things that are on the

side of the body that their left hemisphere doesn't see.

So the left hemisphere has this weird solipsism to it.

It believes it's the only thing in the world. And you get wrapped into a cultural pattern of always

doing things that this world wants you to do. And they're usually productivity measured in

material wealth, power status, but mainly material wealth. Let's just get right down to it.

The left hemisphere loves to grab things. And it tells us all to live by grabbing things. And we're all

told also, don't get out of line. You know, keep things in nice, straight lines and do as you're told and everything

will be great, which is good for some reasons. There's nothing wrong with it, but the world is

bigger than that. And the passion part of our lives, lives, I believe, more, and research shows,

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