Maria Bowler

Kate Bowler: So how is your New Year’s resolution going? Oh, not good? Okay, well, then you’re in the right place. Today is all about letting ourselves off the hook with always getting better and better and better, and instead set a new pace for our lives. This is Everything Happens and I’m Kate Bowler. Today I’m talking with a talented writer, a creativity coach, a retreat leader. She is a beautiful redhead, and yes, I’m speaking about her in a very weirdly personal way because, hey, it’s my sister, Maria Bowler. Maria is my childhood partner in crime. She is someone I have put upside down in a sleeping bag and forced to crawl up the stairs. And she is brilliant and so funny. And she works really hard at understanding the intersection between hustle and grace. She wrote a gorgeous, brand new book called Making Time: A New Vision for Crafting a Life Beyond Productivity, which will leave us all feeling a little kinder toward ourselves, a little more willing to leave behind some relentless grind and just move towards something gentler. In today’s conversation, we’re going to talk about all kinds of things. And she’s so smart. She’s a divinity school grad. She’s a super, super smarty smarty-smart-cakes. But she’s also someone that I trust to give really good advice. So we’re going to talk about that producer self. It’s that voice in all of us that equates our worth with what we do and fix and achieve. And we will ask ourselves, what if we could live differently? And this might be exactly the right episode you need, if, say, you are one of 43% of people who have already failed at their New Year’s resolutions. No judgment, I promise. Maria’s perspective as a spiritual director and creative guide gives us a roadmap today to embrace presence over perfection and rediscover the sacredness of simply being. So whether you’re feeling the itch of the New Year and you want to try something new, or just the exhaustion of keeping it all together, this is the conversation you didn’t know you needed. So let’s step into a slower, kinder rhythm together, shall we? And without further ado, my brilliant sister, Maria Bowler.

Maria Bowler: My gosh. I thank you so much for having me. I’m wondering if people will be able to tell the difference between our voices when they listen, if they listen to this on audio.

Kate: Oh no, that’s exactly right. Well, I mean, they should be so lucky to be in the echo chamber of our love. I am so proud of you, honey. This is such a beautiful book. And what’s so fun is we’re coming to the end of the New Year, New You season. And it is like peak version of the kind of self that you talk about in this book and that you’ve spent so much time thinking about. So I wondered if we could start there with the kind of monster that New Year’s always creates, which is this producer self. Tell me, tell me about the producers.

Maria: Thank you for that. So I offer in the book that we are given this identity and this society as not human beings and not even really defined as strongly by our by our faith or our socioeconomic status, but by our role as producers, producers of value, of experiences, of an image. And all a producer can do is do. Like that’s the only lever to pull for any problem that life presents. So a new year comes up and you’re like, okay, now I’m going to just do things differently. I’m going to I’m going to work out more. I’m going to eat less of something. I’m going to be nicer, by which they mean I’m going to say nicer things. So it can’t actually touch the deeper level of the self, because as producers, we’re always thinking about our lives as an opportunity to do more, do less, do better, do differently.

Kate: Totally. I got I remember I remember when I first met my producer self and it was in the basement of our parents house and I think Dad had just bought the book Getting Things Done. And like, I think the most lethal intervention was this little rule that was like, if you can do something two minutes or less, then you have to do it right away. And the problem is, is that is almost everything that the light touches. But it totally changed me into a very cheerful cyborg who was like very connected to the doing self right away. When did you first meet your inner cyborg?

Maria: I love that you bring that story because I find that a lot of us have two experiences of this producer self. There’s the one that actually does it somewhat successfully, successfully enough to get to a status quo that is working. And then there is the limits we hit with it. So, for example, our dad was always trying to encourage us to to be who we wanted to be in his way. And I wanted to be a writer. So he gave me a writing exercise when I was in elementary school, really young, and he gave me a list of objects to incorporate into a story, and I got overwhelmed by that list of objects. And I came to him and it’s like, I can’t do it. And he said, Well, then you’ll never be a writer. And what he was trying to do in that moment was say like was, you know, do his tough love thing. But what I heard was, doing equals an identity like an aspirational identity. So if I could do it, then then I am the person that I want to be, but I couldn’t do it. And so now I am experiencing this conflict of like, wait, wait. I want to write but I can’t do this thing. And I feel like that is the origin story of my experience with the pressure to produce was actually feeling like I had this standard and I just couldn’t quite meet it. But I became fascinated with this problem because as a writing teacher, there’s a lot you can teach about craft, but when students are trying to express something, there’s only so much writing advice you can give until it actually just becomes more burdensome and they’re more confused about what it is that they are trying to say and trying to do. So that is why I try to look at the problem as an identity problem and escape the whole like, let’s life hack our way around this and get underneath this distracting level of of doing enough.

Kate: Yeah, you had this line that I had to stop and reread a couple of times. You wrote, even the best productivity strategy can make you nothing more or nothing less than exactly who you’ve been before. Yet the sun sets and rises, and you are one day older.

Maria: Right? I mean, how about we all have this experience where we’ve actually achieved with all our doing, we’ve gotten the better outfit. We’ve remodeled the kitchen, and we don’t feel any different. And then we’re like, after the dopamine has gone, like this was supposed to be the thing that made me the calm person or made me the successful person. And I was the same person. And one of the things that I like to ask people when they have a goal in my work is, is okay, great. Like you, let’s say you want to embrace some New Year’s resolution like your maybe you write the book, maybe you have a new routine with your family. Who do you get to be when you’re there? So they imagine themselves as being different at the end. So maybe I’ll be peaceful because I finally finished this thing or I get to feel more connected to my family. Great. How how can we be that and see how you already are that now, and so you’re not withholding this way of being that your soul recognizes this for you when you get the result. There’s this, it’s a, saying that I heard somewhere, but like the way you are on the way is the way you’ll be when you get there. So let’s think about how we want to be and not what we want to be doing, but what quality of presence is actually calling to us. Because we can cultivate that now. We don’t have to wait when we have all the right strategies.

Kate: Yours is a nicer version of the wherever you wherever you go, there you are. But I do like, I like yours better because I think one of the things I struggle with most, and I thought that it would get better after cancer, I really thought it would get better, but the tick tick feeling that I had before because of really wanting to achieve things and it was like driven by hope and ambition and a feeling of vocation. But then after I got sick, it was this like, urgency to cram everything in and you have this great, I like the idea of putting more Nietzsche quotes on cat posters, but the quote, haste is universal because everyone is in flight from himself.

Maria: Well, and why wouldn’t we be in flight from ourselves when we believe that there’s something fundamentally wrong with us? Of course we would. If we are what we do, which is always like, never permanent. Never solid. Then we’re on unstable ground, and we don’t want to spend time with that, look at that. Like, I’m someone who did like maybe medium today or I’m someone who didn’t clean the bathroom when she said she was going to. And, you know, why wouldn’t we speed up our actions to avoid that false identity? Because that feels terrible. But when we’re carrying that around, we’re going to be moving really fast. And even if we’re doing nothing, it’s going to feel urgent.

Kate: Yeah. I’m even thinking, too of all the people, we have a lot of really beautiful caregivers who are in this community and. I think, too, even like the urgency of doing things that are completely necessary and other people depend on, you know, people depend on me. I have to do this. I don’t have a lot of choices and like, they really probably don’t. But then the, the, the sort of endless fried feeling of constant motion still, like even if they’re doing the loveliest thing in the world, still kind of like hollows out that center feeling like, well, then I’m only what I do. And then, gross, right? And then just feeling gross.

Maria: Right. I love how that, I take that feeling of of emptiness and grossness and and see it as evidence that our soul knows better than the like, if we actually could if we actually were satisfied by doing all the things, then we would always end the day feeling fine. So it’s actually beautiful evidence that that’s not who we are and that’s not going to work. It’s not a sign that we’re failing. But that’s how we interpret it. Even doing all the nice things, even like the things that make other people feel good.

Kate: Yeah. I mean. I feel like I know all, all the best people I know, like they don’t often get to have the feelings that they deserve for being the best people I know. We’re going to be right back after a break to hear from our sponsors. Don’t go anywhere. What’s the difference between, like, action and hustle? How do you know if you’re a hustle monster?

Maria: So I talk about the difference between hard work and hustle, because hard work comes with life.

Kate: I guess.

Maria: We’ve all experienced working hard and it feeling satisfying in some way. Like this is just, even if it’s even if we hate it, it just feels we’re not in conflict with the fact that it’s hard. We’re not in conflict with the reality of the situation. Hustle is, on the surface, could look exactly the same as hard work. But the experience of it is trying to run away from a negative outcome or from a thought that feels really painful, or you only thinking about the relief you’ll feel when it’s over. Your believing that if you do enough things, then you’ll avoid the negative outcome. The feeling is holding your breath when you’re hustling.

Kate: Yeah. How do I know of like. So for instance, lots of times with things that are very difficult, like with things, especially with things I can’t change, I speed up a lot. A lot. I become significantly more productive. And I really I think what I want most is just to skip it. Like, I don’t want to, I don’t want to have to have that horrible day. Yeah. So in the middle of a horrible day, I’m going to prep for a podcast or like I’m just trying to like add a lot of things. How can I tell if, like, shifting into the high gear is serving me or not serving me?

Maria: I’m curious when we’re in these moments of wanting to get it over with and shift into high gear, what we’re believing about ourselves when our experience is heart, what we’re making it mean about ourselves. Because if we are making it mean that we are missing a fundamental piece, that that we can’t rely on anyone but ourselves, we can’t help but do do do. It makes perfect sense. And that’s not wrong. Just noticing that, this is the level, this is the lever that I can pull. I’m reaching for kind of the way I know to control things, which is to do things, instead of allowing ourselves to check in with what we’re making it mean and who we’re being.

Kate: One of the stories that I really heard in yours was, well, then if I if I’m not like the hustle monster, then I’m selfish. And do you think selfishness, too, is, where does the story of selfishness come from, I guess, and is it super duper gendered? Do men ever feel selfish? Explain them to me.

Maria: I can’t help but think of selfishness as connected to the belief that the pie is always closed. And that you can calculate all the pieces of who gets what. Like you somehow have a bird’s eye view of all of reality, but the fact is that is a lie of scarcity that our culture and our economic system want us to believe that it’s always you or me. It’s this or that. And of course, to speak to the gender thing, you know, I haven’t, it’s been my experience that people who have are in caregiving roles are often have the view of the whole room in their mind. And so there’s the sense of everyone else’s needs, you know, their view is just kind of trying to hold it all at the same time. And so in that in that case, it’s very tempting to think you have an understanding like of what one thing one person can handle. And so you you you avoid, you know, the wheels falling apart on this ecosystem that you have in your mind by controlling for yourself, for, like, not taking up too much.

Kate: So we grew up like absolutely inundated with Mennonite culture and they have this super aggressively anti-nap policy, which makes me laugh so hard. But one of the one of the big stories they have and because there’s such a wonderful maker culture because they’re always they’re like little busy bees, if you ask them like when’s the last time you took a nap? Like their experience will be the closest thing, I think, to rage for a peaceable people that they’re very mad about the nap situation. And I think they feel genuinely not entitled to rest. I wonder how you think we might be able to modify our feelings that we’re, like selfish if we take a break.

Maria: Right? It’s one of my pet peeves that the argument that people usually use for giving yourself permission to rest is that rest is productive. I would just offer that.

Kate: I like how you say offer in a mad voice. I would just offer…

Maria: I would gently, put on the table, that it is part of every life cycle, every living being’s life cycle. And there are different forms of rest and that we will end up taking it in some way. It will come out sideways if we don’t do it on purpose. So, you know, there can be social rest, you know, just not like filling up your social calendar. There can be obviously physical rest, mental rest, like tuning out stimulation. But I will find that it’s like let go or be dragged. Kind of thing like. Did do rest on purpose. Or you will find yourselves trying to sneak it in by numbing. That’s what the body will do, which is not, again, not wrong. It’s actually very intelligent of our bodies. But we will find ways of like we’re only kind of like half present with our people or we will just go on autopilot for years.

Kate: Yeah, for 2 or 3 decades. You have this really funny, you like wouldn’t mind some like homework being given to people on this one which I want you to, I want you to give me this homework, Maria. When you find yourself taking these breaks, maybe numbing, maybe procrastination. You have a good idea for this?

Maria: I have, I love I love the idea of procrastinating on purpose because the internal difference between rest and procrastination is the resistance to what’s happening. So if you’re lying down and you feel great about lying down, that’s rest. If you’re lying down and you’re beating yourself up for what you’re not doing, the experience of it is procrastination. And so telling yourself to procrastinate on purpose is a sneaky way of removing the resistance, which actually shifts it from procrastination into something else. And I recommend doing the thing that you normally beat yourself up for doing while you’re procrastinating so you can see what the experience of it is like on its own without the resistance to it. So let’s say you procrastinate by scrolling. But if you are, most of us do that unconsciously. So if you do purpose, you can actually get a sense of whether you how much you enjoy it, what you enjoy about it, what how much actually, how much satisfaction you’re geeting versus what you’re not getting. Your experience of it is now like clean from your, or cleaner, from the shame.

Kate: I like that. I do like that. I think it’s funny that we have the same word for creativity without like a objective, but we both say noodling and like, I have a huge noodling policy, which is like it comes for me from that book how How Tom Beat Captain Najork and His Hired Sportsmen. Do you read that one or did I steal it?

Maria: I remember the book, but I don’t remember the story.

Kate: So, there’s this kid named, Tom and he has this horrible aunt named Aunt Fidget Wonkham-Strong with her iron helmet, wherever she walks the trees shiver. And Tom’s constantly, like, noodling around. He’s like, throwing sticks, but turns out that everything he does are actually these wonderful things he knows how to do. So that when the aunt hires her, like, brings this whole group of people to beat him in a set of games, all of his noodling makes him wildly successful at these games. So he wins in the end by by not trying to win at all.

Maria: I mean ask any, for like, I hate this term, but it’s fair in this case, high performance person. So athletes, actors, speakers talking to lots of people. They will always say there is a point where you have to forget what you’re supposed to be doing. Like you do your training, you set your intention. You have learned your skills in your muscle memory, and then you have to stop trying because it is not the doing that makes an impact in the world that that kind of opens up possibility. It’s our being. It’s our it’s our presence. And so not trying is is always this key. And it’s tricky because you can’t try to not try.

Kate: Yeah. It’s like this weird little slipstream in the middle.

Maria: You can set yourself up to trust it more and more. It can become kind of like a normal part of life where it’s like, and this thing happens. Look what happens when I.

Kate: Yeah.

Maria: Set a vague sense of what I want to do and then let my presence do the rest.

Kate: I know you teach creativity and I’m not. I kind of want this magical thing for all the people in this community because they’re so they’re so good at all the hard stuff and like, maybe not so hot on hobbies or like, you know. Just the bubbly up for no reason. But now, the second I say for no reason, it makes me want to ask you about why we should live in no reason season.

Maria: Well, I mean, you just put your your finger on it. The reason why it gets hard for a lot of us as adults, even a professional, quote-unquote creatives, it gets hard for us to feel like we are in the joy that we know is possible and that we remember. And we might even do the things that are like looking joyful. But this also happens for people who are, you know, professionals, creative, creative people is that we get too good at knowing what works.

Kate: I see.

Maria: We get too good at knowing what makes people satisfied. And we also get too good at knowing what the rules of the game are like. We know how the sausage is made, kind of, when we’re adults and we become so familiar with that surface efficacy that everything else starts to feel like a waste of time or maybe like. Maybe we just forgot that we know how to do things. We know how to be when we’re not getting to the result.

Kate: Whoa. Yeah, Yeah. And that could be like Catherine, one of the great joys of my friendship life, is suddenly very into gardening in a way that is taking up a lot of her space lately. And I think she’s very bad at tomatoes, but, like, she’s doing it, but, like, she’s all of a sudden a different self because she’s just messing around.

Maria: Right. And what is fascinating to me is that in different areas of our life, we often get to this moment where we need to ask ourselves if if the result was never going to come, why would we do it? So, you know, for example, if you suddenly had no audience. And you’d have some intention for this?

Kate: Yeah, yeah, the podcast is a perfect example. I really, I get to monopolize one hour of intimate time. And the fact that people listen brings me so much joy. But like I, but I experience discovery, and then I get an experience that I couldn’t, I can’t have by myself. And that blows my mind. And then I would do it, you know, forever.

Maria: Yeah, exactly. So if anyone listening or if you ever reach a point where the the room all starts to turn gray, like you just you’re doing the thing, but you’re kind of losing your sense of connection with whatever it is you’re doing. It could be in any area of your life, if in fact the result you wanted was impossible, if you could care for people and they would never be satisfied. How would you do it? So that’s why I like to play with this idea of like it’s for no reason. It because there’s always something and you might in some scenarios of your life, it might be, alright I would do it completely differently. For example, I have a toddler who is very in the stage where she doesn’t like most of what I make, and so for a while that was just kill my experience of cooking. And then I just had to accept that. Let’s just assume that it was going to be no, and if that if that was the case, then how would I spend my time in the kitchen? How would I be enjoying doing it? And it was a lot more fun.

Kate: We’re going to take a quick break to tell you about the sponsors of this show. We’ll be right back. You have this line that I liked so very much. You wrote, there’s no such thing as doing nothing, the great sin of our culture, because there’s no such thing as being nothing. That was so lovely to me because, like, if we feel our own belovedness, wouldn’t we, maybe, wouldn’t that love just kind of do different things to who we want to be?

Maria: Exactly. I think about this in terms of how we actually experience people through the eyes of love. It’s never about what they do for us. And anyone who has loved someone with special needs knows so intimately that the being of a person shines completely separate from what they do. Meaning we know this in our bones already. We can walk out on the street and see someone and just the look of them like just how they are sparks something in us or we feel them. We know it with other people.

Kate: You’re totally right. I imagine that there’s a little pressure writing a book about creativity because then you have to create while you’re talking about creativity, did writing this book a little bit scare the crap out of you?

Kate: Oh my gosh. I am so glad you brought that up, because I met my own producer self real hard writing this book. So, I had written it before anyone knew I was writing it. And, you know, I had no pressure around it for a long time. And then suddenly there’s an editor and there’s deadlines and I had to eat my words while I was writing about it.

Kate: You were like, there is grace for all– what?

Maria: I found that wheneyes were on me, old narratives of what it meant to create under pressure ,what it meant to be seen, came up. And it worked its way into the book as well. I was kind of writing the sermon I needed to hear, as they say, and exploring what it meant for me to ask for help in a new way. So when you take on more, it was more than my system was used to, like the kind of the breadth of the project, the depth of the project was more than my system was used to. And so I had to kind of at a new level look at like, oh okay. It’s easy when there’s, quote unquote, no pressure. Can I believe this when there’s the temptation to look at it from an outside perspective, to look at it from, you know, the eyes of a future reader or reviewer?

Kate: Who always hates. It in your mind, they’re like, they’re so disappointed. They’ve actually never read anything worse.

Maria: Exactly. It’s always like the like the meanest former colleague you’ve ever had is always just, like, the worst.

Kate: Yeah, I always think I do always think about a colleague being embarrassed of me. That’s terrible. They’re all actually pretty nice.

Maria: Absolutely. So a big part of my process was hitting my own wall of expectation and opening up other people into my process and opening up, so asking for different kinds of support with friends, moving my body in different ways like I was, I would, talk-write it. And all of these ways I realized to kind of deal with my own productivity pressure, were just ways of feeling like myself again and feeling less like a machine. We already have the spirit of what we want to do in us. When it starts to feel like it’s completely impossible, we just have to try as hard and open up our peripherals to remembering that we’re already enough. Our presence is is already there.

Kate: This is my very last question. Because you’re a spiritual director and you help people dig out their, like, gentler self, what’s the nicest thing you could tell yourself or tell somebody else to help them get back into that kind of space? What do you tell yourself, anyway? I have a guess.

Maria: I love to hear your guess, but I will offer mine first. The first thing I would say is you don’t have to do anything more. The presence you have when you’re feeling the most like yourself, whether that’s playing with your dog or that moment when you get in the car and you turn on the radio, or when you’re talking with a friend for a minute that really gets you, that quality, that presence. Is who you really are. And if you trust that, then what might your to do list mean? If you did nothing else but be present to yourself and the people around you, you would get as much done. You would move the needle, to use corporate speak, more than anything else you could add to your to do list. One of the reasons you are such a good podcast host is because your quality of presence here is authentic to who you are. And you enjoy it. You’re saying you would do it even without the audience because it gives you ,because you are connected to your own curiosity in that moment. You can ask all the right questions and the impact would be very different.

Kate: It’s also hard to trick people into spending time with me if they don’t think it’s going to be available to the world.

Maria: There are those logistics. That’s true. I’m curious what you thought I was going to say to myself.

Kate: It just reminded me of the thing you said to me that I kept in my, when I was getting very frantic and my like doing, doing, doing really kicked up 12 notches. You sent me the loveliest note that just said, You are loved. You are loved. You are loved. You will not disappear. You are here. I think that.

Maria: So true.

Kate: You’ve done something beautiful, honey. It’s so nice to talk to you about it.

Maria: Thank you.

Kate: Maria’s words invite us to consider the question: Who do we get to be when we step off the treadmill of hustle? And maybe, like, even more radically, who are we already without doing one more thing? As we step into the days ahead, whether they’re brimming with plans or full of life’s regular rhythm, may you carry this truth. You are loved. You are loved. You are loved. Not for what you achieve or what you accomplish, but simply because you are here. So let’s just bless that, okay? The person that doesn’t have to do another darn thing. A blessing maybe if you’re a little tired. So here we go. Blessed are you, weary one. You who feel the weight of the world’s demands and yet dare to pause even for a moment and wonder, Is there more here than this? Then all this doing and making and chasing and striving? Than the laundry and checklists, gym memberships and morning routines. Blessed are you not for what you accomplish, but for the quiet truth of who you are. A soul already worthy, already loved. May you find joy in this simple act of being. And may you remember, even on the hardest days, that grace is not earned. It is yours to receive.

Kate: Well, thank you for listening, lovey. I hope this time together was a reminder that you are so much more than what you do and what you make and what you check off your endless to do lists. And if this episode resonated with you, I would love it if you shared it with someone who just might need a little reminder of their own belovedness. And if you want to keep this conversation going, we would love to hear your thoughts. Call us and leave us a voicemail at (919) 322-8731. Or come find me online at @Katecbowler. Until next time, my dears. A big thank you to our funding partners, Lilly Endowment, the Duke Endowment and Duke Divinity School. And to the team behind everything happening at Everything Happens. Jess Ritchie, Harriet Putnam, Keith Weston, Baiz Hoen, Gwen Heginbotham, Brenda Thompson, Iris Greene, Hailie Durrett, Anne Herring, Hope Anderson, Kristen Balzer, Eli Azanio, Katherine Smith, and Megan Cruckleton. Thank you. This is Everything Happens with me, Kate Bowler.