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

So I am here now and I am talking to you about the gift of uncertainty. I'm borrowing on my friend

Gavin DeBecker's phrase, the gift of fear. Paradoxically named titles, yeah. So the gift of fear is about

how we have an instinctive knowledge to act in our own best interests when negative things are

happening and how every other form of fear is unnecessary.

And if you read Gavin's book, Gavin DeBecker, The Gift of Fear,

you will see why I am Gaga over him.

He's awesome.

On a similar note, it may not be easy to be thankful for the gift of fear, but it may be even harder to be thankful for the gift of uncertainty.

I've got a lot of loved ones right now who are kind of in limbo spaces, waiting on career news, waiting on medical news, just trying and waiting and always in limbo. And it's awful. It's a really hard space to be in. It's one of the hardest things that

happens to us as humans, right? Maybe not. Here's the deal. I've been reading, because I'm

writing this book on anxiety, I've been reading

tremendous amounts of psychology, but also neuroscience for lay people, sometimes the official

journals, some of those are amazing. And also I've been reading about the development of culture

and how it reflects the psychology of us as individuals and how there's a sort of

feedback loop. We put things out into the culture. The culture feeds it back to us and it increases

the way we're already thinking. Now, one of the things I read this week that was so fascinating

and I had to tell you about it is that the left hemisphere, you've heard me say this. You've

seen me with my friend Jill

Boltey Taylor, who literally wrote the book on the right and left hemisphere in my stroke of

insight and more recently her wonderful book, Whole Brain Living.

And we've talked about how there are these differences between the left and right hemispheres

...