How would your life look if you arranged it so you could do what you love? Rob Bell has one of the most pure, electric, inspiring and infectious energies for life. He’s truly engaged in the mystery and is such a model for doing things your own way. A former megachurch pastor, who is the New York Times bestselling author of “Love Wins” and ten other books has been encouraging us to engage in the joy of life for many years. In a time of “influencers,” cheap fixes, social media narcissism, hustle culture, self-improvement by meme, and increasingly shallow teachers, he’s a rare example of someone who walks the talk. He’s far more interested in remaining curious than appearing to have all the answers and we love that about him. Rob Bell: https://robbell.com/ Rob’s Everything Is Spiritual Tour: https://robbell.com/event/all-new-everything-is-spiritual-tour/ Rob Bell: An Introduction to Joy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sA7LmEn3xyc Spotify playlist for this episode: https://open.spotify.com/playlist/63nPvfLdS50UjcXlc3N2jZ Tell Me Something True is a 100% independent podcast. There are no corporations or advertisers backing this community. We are 100% funded by the TMST community. Support TMST today so you can hear the uncut interviews, attend private events with Laura and help keep TMST ad-free: https://tmst.supercast.com/
Tell Me Something True with Laura McKowen
Rob Bell on Doing What You Love
[00:00:00] Laura McKowen: Hey, it's Laura. If you're listening to this, you're not hearing the complete unedited version of this conversation. If you want in on that, you can get it by becoming a TMST Plus member. Just head over to our website at tmstpod.com and click support. All right. Enjoy this.
[00:00:28] Hello? Hello, Laura here. Oh man. Today's guest has been one of the most requested interviews even before our first episode aired. Rob Bell entered my life sometime around 2013 or 2014, when I was really, really seeking at the end of my drinking and the beginning of what I knew was a significant becoming for me into something else.
[00:00:57] I knew I wanted to be a writer. I knew in some sense that I was a writer and I had started to claim that calling and put words down and even began to share them, but it was all still so new and tender and shaky. I think I saw a video of him giving a talk about Everything is Spiritual and that next week he happened to be coming to Boston right after I saw that video.
[00:01:23] So I bought a ticket and I went to see him talk and had one of those experiences at the House of Blues where my whole body lit up in recognition. I just wanted what he had since then. He's been a consistent teacher of mine and someone I find myself going back to time and again, to get grounding and clarity and that unique energy that only Rob has. He just has one of the most pure electric, inspiring, and infectious energies for life.
[00:01:58] He's truly engaged in the mystery and such a model for doing things your own way in a time of quote unquote influencers, cheap fixes, social media narcissism, hustle culture. He is a rare example of someone who actually walks the talk. He's far more interested in remaining curious than appearing to have all the answers and I love that about him. So this isn't the first time I interviewed Rob. We had him on twice on HOME podcast, but this felt entirely different because those interviews were in many ways a lifetime ago. I've learned so much since then and have solidly situated myself in that dream. I was just starting to let myself imagine back when I first stumbled upon him in 2013. In some ways I'm even more of a student than I was then. It's just that the questions are different.
[00:02:58] And the decades since Rob has emerged as a pastor, he has patiently, persistently been engaged in a project of hope inclusion and a desire to bring a calming clarity to the world. He's the New York Times bestselling author of 11 books, including Love Wins, Everything is Spiritual and Drops Like Stars. He's toured with Oprah, been featured in the New Yorker, and in 2011 was named one of the most 100 influential people by Time Magazine. His podcast, The Robcast, is one of my consistent go-tos. This conversation came to me at exactly the right time and I have a feeling it might have that effect on you too. We dig into big themes like contentment, airtight integrity, the stories we tell ourselves and questions like, am I in the right place? Am I living how I want to live? Is there any joy in what I'm doing? I hope you enjoy this time with Rob Bell.
[00:04:20] Thinking about all the potential things that I could maybe talk to you about and I rewatched The Heretic. You had this sort of big world and then in 2011, Love Wins comes out and things change. You talk about going from speaking to crowds of 1500 to like 50 people sometimes. You talk at one point about this gratitude that you feel and you can hear it sort of crackling when you're talking, that it's coming up in you, this gratitude. And to me, it's humility. There's a lot of humility in that. So I wanted to ask you, what have you learned about humility in the past 10 years?
[00:05:13] Rob Bell: Well, I think when I stumbled into the image of being a student. I didn't do that well in school. I found it very constrictive and not that imaginative, so it's odd that academics and academia were never that compelling to me. But after that, the idea of being a student truly captivated me. Even when I got trained as a pastor, I went to seminary and did all that, and it was the Jesus having students, disciples, that was the thing that I liked. It was almost like the tuning fork. It was like the note. I was like, oh, I could be a student because that had this element of curiosity and wonder, and you didn't expect to have it all figured out. There's like a number of assumptions and expectations just built in that one image of a student.
[00:06:16] I think honestly at some point, Laura, early on that just became like the lens. So it's interesting when you interact with somebody within a couple of minutes, or if you ask a few questions, you can quite quickly figure out a person's lens. Some people just wear it like a name tag, you know, like achievement. Achievement is pretty much my deal.
[00:06:39] You know what I mean? Like sometimes you can see them coming. You're like, oh yeah, right, right, right. The neon green Lamborghini in my neighborhood. Got it. You know what I mean? Like the lens is fairly straightforward, but for the student... humility is baked into that.
[00:06:59] It's also interesting to me how the person who charges into the building and grabs the people when it's on fire and comes out. When they interview her about her heroic deed, she never uses words like courage or bravery. She's like, I just ran into the building. The people who embody those words never use those words because it was just called Tuesday.
[00:07:21] Laura McKowen: I don't know if you remember the moment I'm talking about in the movie where you're talking in the back of a car and you recount how there were lots of people and then there were no people. And then there's this moment where you say the gratitude is so big and you just sort of stop there. What was going on?
[00:07:49] Rob Bell [audio from the film “The Heretic”]: So I started doing clubs and theater tours in 2006. The venues kept getting bigger. I mean, like solid. I was like doing the rooms that my favorite bands do. It was like whoa and then Love Wins came out in 2011 and that fall, I did a club and theater tour. I'll never forget the booking agents saying, yeah, tickets aren't selling that well. And then I would go to a town where I was last time. I was there at sold out with thousand people, 1200 people, and I'd walk out on stage and there'd be 50 people huddled in the middle of this cavernous theater. I remember a friend of mine saying, dude, you lost your audience. I had to make peace with maybe you had your moment and now the rest of your life, you'll just quietly sort of fade and you'll have your life with your family. You'll go surfing. You'll figure out something else to do. Chris and I had this running joke from spinal tap. Maybe I'd sell shoes. I think you're at 11.
[00:09:20] I had to go through all that. That was the fall of 2011. I'm just thinking of it. That took a while. It was like a death. So now it's six years later and there's like people buying a ticket to sit up a floor when it's literally standing room only. I have a level of gratitude.
[00:10:01] Laura McKowen: What was going on? What
[00:10:02] Rob Bell: My dad used to say the greatest when I was growing up. He had these things that he would repeat over and over and one of them was, “the greatest gift you can give yourself is to love your work”. He used to say He's like, I've never woken up in the morning not wanting to go to work. There's probably a whole world of things there, but it was really interesting. He was like, can you imagine getting up in the morning and not wanting to go? Like for him, it was like, what? But that really did something to me. So finding something to do in the world that I loved. Can you believe we get to do this?
[00:10:46] Laura McKowen: Even when it broke your heart.
[00:10:49] Rob Bell: And then you just keep going. I mean I had zero, obviously I had zero edit or control over that movie because that was part of the interesting experiment for Kristen and I was just to let somebody make whatever they wanted to make. And I absolutely adore Andrew, the filmmaker, but that was like his lens. It's a way you could tell a portion of a story, but people not appreciating my work, there've been a solid decade of that before that film. So that actually none of that was ever that interesting. Cause it had varying degrees of volume, but otherwise there was just like refrigerator buzz.
[00:11:30] If you're quiet enough, you can hear it in the corner. But that was never what was interesting. What was interesting was the exploration and the learning and stretching and the transcendence and the unexpected surprise. Like that was always where all the life was. So yeah, that particular period like that sort of moment of, oh, this might really change going forward.
[00:12:00] It still was all like an evolution in a particular direction. So you just keep coming back to “can you believe we get to do this?”. I mean, a couple of nights ago in Portland, the first night of this new tour and this new tour is like, I haven't done anything like this before and just going out and trying it.
[00:12:23] Laura McKowen: Wait. What do you mean what's new? What's new about it?
[00:12:26] Rob Bell: Oh, you'll have to see it. Give me some time. Just me all alone on a stage talking for two hours has been how it's been for about 30 years. At the end of the last tour, I was like, this is the end of this tour, but it's also the end of something. It’s the end of a whole way of thinking about this. And I've been trying some things that involve the people who are there creating the show with me in the moment that I had been trying a couple things. It was like, well, what if you took this farther? What if I didn't know where things were going next? What if all the musculature, you build up, you set aside? That's some of the questions that led to this and it’s like what if you tried that? Then it all feels like all of the years of learning and growing and then there's this moment and this thing I'm trying. So I just go back to your question.
[00:13:33] You're trying something. It could work. It could not. You're more alive than ever. Yeah. That's what we all want. It's what everybody wants. You want wonder and awe about your own existence. So all this other stuff, like all the things that people talk about with success. That's fine, I guess, but no, you want to wake up in the morning and have a sense of, “oh, we get to do this!”. Yeah, that's actually what everybody wants.
[00:14:04] Laura McKowen: It is. It's not what gets sold, but that's why the whole line for the show is “for people who want to fall in love with the mystery of life again”.
[00:14:14] Rob Bell: Beautiful. Yeah.
[00:14:17] Laura McKowen: Yeah. I know that feeling too. Okay, so this leads me into something else. One of the questions that's been rolling around in me a lot in the past year or two, is what is enough? Like what is enough success? What are enough followers? What's enough money? What's enough house? What are enough friendships? Like what is enough?
[00:14:49] You've talked about the strong lens that was sort of on you. I've tried on some different lenses. I have a proclivity towards chasing more and I reached a point where I realized I was like on the treadmill. I was just on a treadmill and then more treadmill. I started battling with this question of what is enough and it’s sort of where I've been sitting. I have a question about contentment, I guess, and I can't think of a better word. Maybe we can come up with a better word.
[00:15:22] Rob Bell: It's a great word,
[00:15:25] Laura McKowen: Contentment. Feeling like you really do have enough and you are enough.
[00:15:33] And that tension between that and sort of striving and trying, because as you said, like a lot of people, what they want is to feel enraptured in this mystery to have meaning, I think, and that requires effort. A lot of times you find yourself squarely in a place where that is not your existence. You're not there. You’re somewhere else.
[00:15:56] I knew when in 2012, when I had to get [00:16:00] sober, like I had not lived into potential that I knew was there. And that was, uh, the alcohol was killing me, but it was a deep spiritual death. Like that was really killing me. So I had to effort and strive. So I'm wondering about that tension., it seems like you don't struggle with that.
[00:16:20] Like this sort of striving versus contentment.
[00:16:23] Rob Bell: Oh, God. These are the questions. Yeah. This ambition drive piece. Oh, these are the questions. So actually, if a person doesn't have these questions, that's actually where the problems are. Like, you have a gift you want to give. You want to help, so of course you would ask questions like, “I really enjoy doing this. Could I do this more? Is there anybody else I can help?”. Of course. So, notice how it sits within you and if it sits within you as anxiety. For most people, any tension is something to be eliminated as opposed to tension as a sign of life.
[00:17:19] There are a couple things on the front end, such as “is this sustainable?”. That's one of the first questions to ask about all of this. It's only sustainable if it's for a chapter, but if it's just endless into the future, that's what kills a person. Is it just this pushing as hard as possible? The addiction to being noticed and fame and such is everywhere, but here in Los Angeles it takes on almost cartoonish proportions. The people who everybody sees and hears and knows and follows and talks about... what those folks do to stay on your radar is completely insane.
[00:18:12] Laura McKowen: Have you ever been hooked by it at all?
[00:18:13] Rob Bell: What a great question.I have had at different times, people around me who said the kind of things about what's possible that you get starry eyed. That's a really good question and nobody's ever asked me that. Yeah, probably. But I had a series of experiences that broke me of it, and I watched a couple of people I'm close to ride that rocket to the sun. I was given a front row seat to all of what I wanted without it being me and saw, oh my God, there's a whole thing. Actually some of my own experiences were like that. It wasn't fun. Here's an example. All the best to all the publicists out there, but a publicist is pitching you all the time, trying to get somebody to notice you. So they're standing in the street tossing pebbles, and I have had wonderful publicists, but the premise is somebody somewhere is trying to get you in front of people. That's a particular energetic imprint at least in what I do. If you, Laura, go to get help from the guru, who's up in the cave. You climb up the mountain and you go into the cave and you say to the guru, “Hello, I need some help” and the guru says to you, “Great, but first could you help me get more Instagram followers?” You're like, “Crap, I gotta go higher up the mountain. This guru can't help me.” So what happened to me, Laura, is the machinery and my encounter and experiences of that machinery were directly diametrically opposed to the actual spaces I'm trying to create for people, which are spaces that are free from that. I can't help you if I'm actually thinking about Instagram. Kristen and I have lived here in west Hollywood, and seven years have been flushing all of that out of the system, almost like defiantly off the grid. Build it ourselves, and just quietly go about doing the work.
[00:21:06] Laura McKowen: What does that look like? I'm so curious about this question.
[00:21:10] Rob Bell: It looks like talking to you because I know talking to you will be exactly the kind of interaction that we're here to have. All I ever think about are interactions with people like you and what's the next thing to make.
[00:21:29] Laura McKowen: Instead of say, choose the opportunity where you don't even feel aligned with anything someone's saying, but they have 500,000 followers.
[00:21:38] Rob Bell: That's it. That's one of the things I would have said 10 years ago, “Hey, do this and this will put you in front of all these new people.” Now I’ve got my next play and here's like a stack of three by five cards, which would be the fourth play. Here's a stack of cards of the first scenes that are coming to me and then here's like a couple of scraps of paper with the next things I'm working on. Then here's where a couple of the ideas are actually arranged in sequence. That's the joy.
[00:22:27] Laura McKowen: Yeah. So that's when I started talking about humility. I can tell who my teachers are over time because I go back to them over time. There's some people I've been like, oh, they're the angry voice and the loud voice and it's very enticing and seductive and then it burns out. Over the years I have gone back to your work again and again and again, and that to me is indicative of all of the people I would consider teachers. It is that aspect about you that reminds me continually to get grounded in what it is I'm chasing and what it is I'm not chasing. The whole south star thing was like, thank you forever. Thank you for ever.
[00:23:26] Rob Bell: Yeah. The really interesting thing then for you is anything that has energetic charge, you pay attention to. I've worked with so many people who say social media makes me insane, like a whole buzz, a whole anxiety. They're like, I can't do marketing. I hate marketing. I hate promotion. So there's energy there. There's a charge there. Okay. So let's use different words. Anything involving social media for me, I just call it informing and inviting. I will spend 10 seconds maybe sometime this week telling people I'll be in Detroit and Chicago and Columbus next week. It will take 10, maybe 15 seconds.
[00:24:12] I will inform and invite because there's a free global broadcast platform to tell the people who have said we'd like to know what I'm up to. And I'm not an idiot. Do you know what I mean? Like it’s free. I love inviting people to what I'm up to and I often will say it's more fun when you're there, because it is true. It's more fun. So like you laughing right there. You have to name it how Laura names it. You're actually building a whole Laura ecosystem with airtight integrity where everything is how you do it. What I often notice is people will enter into a space and then be resentful that that space works a particular way.
[00:25:03] Well, that's business, that's publishing, that's being an entrepreneur. That space conventionally works a particular way. You can challenge the way it works and try to subvert it. That's great, but don't go into a space and then be shocked that it works a particular way.
[00:25:17] Laura McKowen: Right. It works the way it's intended to work.
[00:25:20] Rob Bell: People who are experts in that field are probably going to say something like that, you know what I mean? It's almost like, just take the charge out and go, do you want to work in that space? Okay. You're going to be interacting with people like that. You want to do it on your own? You won't have all that, but you will be able to do it however you want. It's almost like you take all of the electricity out of it and then go, okay so how do I want to play this? And for so many people, if you move it to playing fields, then it becomes looser and lighter and it loses that slog feeling and it becomes well, what do you want to do next? Okay. Let's try that.
[00:26:07] Laura McKowen: Yeah, no, that's really good. Or you can know, you can choose to not participate in anything that you don't want to participate in.
[00:26:16] Rob Bell: Absolutely. So much stuff that used to be like, oh, oooh, is now like, nah. I got this stack of cards here and I got the next idea and that's good times.
[00:26:36] Laura McKowen: So good. It's so good. You just said airtight integrity. It's something I've heard you say a bunch of times. I don't know if it's something you've been talking about for a long time, but I didn't pick up on it until maybe the last year or so. Will you talk about it?
[00:26:51] Rob Bell: Well, I've just noticed how many people will talk about what they're doing and they're like throwing up in their mouth as they talk about it, almost conceding. But why? So there's some way you move in the world.
[00:27:10] Laura McKowen: I can speak from my own experience, but what happens when you are throwing up in your mouth when you're trying to do the work you're trying to do?
[00:27:21] Rob Bell: Yeah. Then I would pause. What is this here? What is this? What is this? As opposed to something that arises to be eliminated, something that arises that is on your side to tell you the truth about something. For example, is whoever I'm partnering with, do I have alignment there? You would not believe how many people I have worked with in these sessions that I do who brought in questions like that. Are you aligned with these people? Oh my God.
Laura McKowen: No, but I need them.
Rob Bell: So, notice that first question. Are you aligned? No, I need them. Okay. Hold on. 7 billion people on a planet, a million cells die each second. Your body replaces them. It is a place of wondrous generativity that the universe has massively creative. So the moment I need this person or think about those singing competition shows like American Idol, where they interview the person backstage right before they go on and they're super emotional and their mom is in the front row who needs this kidney transplant. I'm not mocking it, but I am.
[00:28:38] And they say, this is my one shot. What's really interesting in that moment is that the camera loves that emotional, slightly desperate, passionate, “this is my one shot.” That's actually broadcasting lack and scarcity. If this is your one shot, that is a warped constricted view of life that will only bring misery. And yet you think about the first time in school you were explained that this test will be graded on a curve and it was like only a few people will get the A's. We have been conditioned from early on that scarcity is the game. The economic systems, the academic systems, the social constructs are all built on scarcity.
[00:29:35] When a person says, “Yes, but I need them to do this” in my experience somewhere deep, deep in the center of their being, there’s like a tiny millimeter needle move from scarcity to abundance, from lack to generativity. You have options. There are other ways. The playing field is much, much different. There are so many of these deep seated postures that actually shape the whole thing.
[00:30:11] Laura McKowen: I see that the most, too. This locked frame or a pie. It's even just saying things like, I finally got to a place where I refuse to say I can't afford that because that’s all I would ever say. Can't afford that, can't afford that. And it's like, just saying, no, I'm going to choose not to spend my money on that. It sounds tiny, but I paid, I
[00:30:41] Rob Bell: Massive.
[00:30:42] Laura McKowen: I'm writing my next book and I wrote about money in it and I mean, I was $200,000 in debt seven years ago. I finally paid it off and it's like, what moment? There was a lot of things in [00:31:00] there, but, but one of the big ones was like, stop talking like that.
[00:31:03] Rob Bell: Yeah. So like words, create worlds and words have all these energetic imprints. I, one of the things on this new tour I do, as I tell the audience, I'm going to say a phrase and don't listen with your mind, listen with your body and tell me how your body reacts to this phrase.
[00:31:25] Okay. Here's the phrase: supposed to. What's fascinating is to watch a theater full of people, all jolt their bodies. People have a visible, visceral physical reaction when they're given the phrase supposed to. So, when you ask about airtight integrity, just let your body listen to the ways that you are naming who you are and what you're doing. The body knows. I've heard people say things like, “well, now I'm going to have to write the book and we all know how difficult that is”. Well, guess what? Guess what writing the book is going to be? Difficult. Like, if you've already decided. Switch with money. This isn't like there's just millions. In religion they call it health and wealth. That's not a fake motivational speaker promise or something. That's just making sure that you haven't already shrunk the thing down before you even started.
[00:32:53] Laura McKowen: I was reading this book by Karen Horney, who's a Neo Freudian psychologist. She’s the woman who you never hear about in the Jungian world of psychology because she was a woman at that time. She called it the tyranny of shoulds.
[00:33:11] Rob Bell: Oh, there you go. Yeah. In our house, we'll say we don't should on ourselves. Um, yeah. I think you're going to see more and more people waking up to how you frame and experience shapes what the experience even is. That framing language and the power of words and how words create worlds. We're already seeing people realizing all these whole worlds of things that are hanging out inside of words.
[00:33:54] Mikel Ellcessor: Hi, I'm Mikel. I'm the executive producer of Tell Me Something True and I co-created the show with Laura. We built TMST and our online community with the hope of creating a sane spot on the internet. We're really passionate about the ad-free nature of this work. Our belief is that this project we're best. if we're not hustling to keep advertisers happy, and we keep our attention on you, the TMST community, and this is where you can play a major role. TMST Plus is the membership group that helps to keep this podcast. Whether it's through a monthly membership or a one-time contribution, TMST Plus members are vital to this experiment. As a TMST Plus member, you get to join Laura for member only events send in questions for the guests.
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[00:35:23] Laura McKowen: So back to this enough and the striving versus being content. The tension. Do you feel more often than not like you have enough? Like you are enough? And what does that look like to you both on the outside and the inside?
[00:35:50] Rob Bell: Wide open spaces. I don't rush. I actually only do a few things. This is what I'm doing today, talking to you. I only do a few things and there's lots of wide open space and time to be. I don't rush places and I don't try to fit things in, and I'm not busy. I completely reject the idea that someone says, “You got this one life, you better do something with it”. Get out of my face right now. Get out. That's all scarcity. It's all a warped relationship with time because it puts all sorts of anxiety on a person that somehow time is supposed to deliver a thing as opposed to just being here. If you clean up your relationship with time, we're not trying to cram a bunch of things in before we die. We're trying to be here and be healthy and be present and be centered and then ever so gradually we'll have a sense of what's next and then we'll do it and then we'll get the next sense.
[00:37:14] And as opposed to these tensions about, do you want to do more, do you want to do less? Those are signs of life. Do you want to go to another city? Like, you're going to write a second book. Okay. Let's write a second book. Like of course that's all the grit and that's all the back and forth of this incarnation. So as opposed to what's wrong with me, you're learning how to be Laura. Notice how you learned in your first book how to write a book, but the second book isn't the first book.
[00:37:48] You may have to toss everything you learned because the second book might be completely different. The musculature from the first book is kind of helpful, but then you're also starting all over again. You're going to learn all of this. So everything from the past is kind of helpful, but there may be things you did in the first book that actually get in the way of what you're trying to do with the second book. All you can ever do is be present to the second book and see what it wants to be. If we slow down and we don't need time to deliver certain things to us. So what happened in the industrial revolution with the eight hour workday is that time came to be seen as units that were good to produce things as opposed to time as a key understanding time as a construct of the mind to make sense of things.
[00:38:41] It's real, like this was 10:00 am my time today that we talked. That's real and yet it's also not absolute. My prediction is that in the next 10 years you're going to see more and more people realize that the way they've been thinking about time, wasn't actually helpful or accurate. You're going to see a revolution in how people understand time. I think COVID did a wonderful job of showing people, oh, you can slow it way down. You can take away tons of things and all that wide open space is actually filled with all sorts of interesting things. You have more people talking about the eternal now. You have more people talking about being present, talking about meditation.
[00:39:20] This is all, this is all beautiful, but it's all in some ways, detoxifying us from this, go do the work and time. Two hours of work gets you that much money to get you that much stuff. It's not all transactions.
[00:39:46] Laura McKowen: That's tyranny too. Wow.
[00:39:53] Rob Bell: Yes, exactly. So you can see how these patterns are so deep sort of in the neurology of people.
Laura McKowen: It’s invisible. I mean, it's the water. We don't even know. It's like, wait, what?
Rob Bell: You have to like drag the fish up on the beach and look back at that thing you were just in.Yeah. So I love your question about contentment. You have something in front of you that takes that you are giving your energies to. It has got all of that lovely mix of challenge and joy. You're not bored, you're not buried and it's sustainable and whatever it brings, you were like, ooh, that took a lot. Like this past weekend, the whole new show, the travel, all the weird COVID stuff. Like, like I'm tired today. Yeah, and I'm talking to you. And then I'm going to go over to my son's house. Then he and I are going to go to Home State, one of our favorite taco places. And then we're going to listen to some new mixes of songs he's been recording. Then I'm going to go pick my daughter up from school. I got an idea for the next Robcast and I'm going to make some notes on that. I'm trying to say it. I am saying it like it actually is. So in your question of what's enough, it's wonderful.
[00:41:26] Laura McKowen: It's so good. And I can hear people going, okay, Rob, I have three kids. I have a job. I have this. I have that. Yeah. Okay. So you know where I'm going. Like, what do you mean? How can I do less? How much of this is energy at what you go at the things in front of you and how much is it of the actual stuff that has to get done?
[00:41:55] Rob Bell: Right. There's a whole base level of things, especially somebody who has a job and three kids. There's a whole baseline there. So I would immediately begin with, what things do you need to lose? So the person who says, well, I got three kids. Okay. So that's what we're doing now. Okay. So what other things? Let's do that, let's do that really well. Oftentimes the person says, but I don't want to miss out on... what's interesting about being fully present to the three kids and the work is when you are fully present to that, you will be rescued from the anxiety of thinking you're missing out on anything, because you'll want to be nowhere else.
Laura McKowen: So you gotta say that again.
So what happens is people confuse spirit and form. Spirit is what animates form. I met a woman over the weekend who's writing a novel and she's like, I have no idea where it's going. And I was like, how about you try saying that sentence like it's the greatest thing ever. She goes, I'm writing a novel and I have no idea where it's going. So she said the exact same sentence twice, but they had massively different animating energies. So the person who's like, but I have all these things I'm doing...
[00:43:24] Okay. Do you have to be doing all those? First off, let's just chuck all the clothes you don't wear. Let's clean out all your closets of the stuff you don't need. So in my experience, so many people have so many layers of clutter. There's just so much stuff and duty and obligation and assumptions. Like, and then all my kids need to be in sports. No they don't. Maybe they need to go home. Go to school and then just come home. Like the number of assumptions about what modern life demands.
[00:44:02] Laura McKowen: I get the sense from you that this is a built-in part of who you are, but it takes a subversive stance for a lot of people to say, ah, I'm not participating in that because there's so much noise. There's so much pressure. There's so much, you know, the other moms and the other parents and the other people.
[00:44:21] Rob Bell: Just not saying that you're busy, just not always reflexively saying, oh, we're so busy, we're so busy. Just deciding not to be busy. So what happened early on is my wife, Kristen, was never impressed with volume of activity. Early on, she would say things like, and that's why I started writing books as I had these ideas. And I was like, I think this is a book. And she's like, imagine all those 10 things that you want to do. Imagine if you didn't do the 10 things you said no to seven or eight of them, and you only did two things, but those two or three things contained the presence and energy of the 10 things. She's like, it would probably actually be way more satisfying. So often people will say like, their question will be, I just have so many ideas. They'll mention this thing, the Enneagram, and say I'm a seven and I have so many ideas and I'll be like, tell you what, let's try this, try this. Try doing one of them and finishing it.
[00:45:28] Otherwise the person's just all over the planet, sliding across the surface of things. They're here, they're here. They're here. They're here. Slow down. A friend of mine, he's so awesome. He's so wonderfully social. And just the other night he was like, yeah, we've had people over the past three nights for dinner. It was just exhausting. I was like, but you love it. He said, yeah. He's like, but you're telling me it's exhausting. Yeah. Well, what if you didn't? It's just, it'd be okay. Yep. And he brought it up. So there is something about the things that get planted in our head about expectations and assumptions about how this is supposed to go. My experience has been whenever you are poking those and questioning those generally most movements integrate and peace and contentment come, when you become aware of an assumption that was so close, you couldn't even see it. It was just, well, this is what we do. And then there's this moment. And generally, the psychosomatic experience of the moment is duh.
[00:46:45] Like, I can't believe, I didn't see that. The person generally is like, oh, I don't have to put my kids in that thing. They almost judge themselves for how simple it was, but that's okay. It's okay. We're so profoundly conditioned. Just take it easy on yourself. Yeah. But the moment when the person realizes, oh, that's an assumption.
[00:47:09] So if you and I went to the local park and we listened in on the parents, within a couple of minutes we would be able to spot the center of gravity. What's expected? What are the norms? What are the standards that everybody has agreed are how it's done? Consciousness always finds a center of gravity of some sort. Most steps, integrate or freedom, peace and contentment come when a person spots one of those they'd been living according to that they don't need to. It was actually just something that was constructed. This was actually, and I can't believe I'm saying this. This was the underbelly gift of the previous presidency. It is one of the gifts that the president gave in his, I don't even know what the word is. Insanity? He showed how malleable things are, that the clay is actually way softer than anybody realized. You could actually, with zero experience, completely hijack and co-opt an entire political party in a system that has two of them.
[00:48:28] One of the mind-bending things is this person just kept showing how things that everybody took to be solid ground and just the substructure of things is actually very bendy and malleable.
Laura McKowen: And everyone’s life is like that. Everyone’s life is like that.
Rob Bell: So yes, yes, yes. So going back to your question, the person who's like, yeah, but I like that thing you're describing, but I have this many kids. I would just immediately start asking questions about where is it more malleable than you realize? We will find spaces and all you need is a couple of things. We actually can't handle that much transformation at once. That's why it’s the long slow arc of evolution, a couple steps forward a step back. By the way, I would argue that cancel culture for all of its good calling out things, the reason why it often seems to own goal itself and shoot itself in the foot is because the loudest people haven't made peace with their own evolution. They haven't made peace with the long slow march of their own evolution so they go hunting for the histories of others. I can't
Laura McKowen: I'm going to need a minute with that one.
Rob Bell: When you see that it's not just speaking truth, but it is a harsh, almost knee-jerk jumpiness to crush others because they're not enlightened enough forward enough or whatever enough, sometimes you can sense the energy. The energy is just so clearly... No, let's talk about your own story. Let's go back through your own story and make peace with all of your own story first.
[00:50:30] Laura McKowen: Yeah, I think there's, there's a lot of truth in that. If what you're saying is, it's easier. It's too uncomfortable to stay in what you're doing, what it is, what's happening within you. It's a lot easier to go, but you, but you, but you...
[00:50:44] Rob Bell: Yes, every once in a while when you're like, wait, what is that? What is off? What you can see? People go, wait, what is off there? Probably what is off there is a person's peace with their own unfolding trajectory. And when there isn't peace there, then you have to go hunting
[00:51:04] Laura McKowen: And it’s too easy.
[00:51:04] Rob Bell: It's so easy, much easier, much easier, much easier. So the whole thing is more malleable than we often realize and you go hunting for all the places where a person was like, no, this is how it works. And it's like, are you sure? Are you sure? And those are the moments of, oh, the little jailbreaks. Little jailbreaks.
[00:51:34] Laura McKowen: Little jailbreaks. That's a good podcast. Yeah. You have a lot of them as a parent, or I have. You don't have to participate in that group, that mom group or whatever. You don't. I don't, I don't have to do that. My daughter doesn't have to have, you know, 14 friends. My daughter doesn't have to, we don't have to bring gifts to parties. We don't have to have a birthday party.
[00:52:00] Rob Bell: Oh, you're so true. You are so right. Your kid comes along and it’s like, if you're really paying attention to your kid, you'll know. How's my kid doing? It's fine. Okay. What, what are they, what do they need here? If there's any need for that? Okay. That's like whatever I had in my head about what it was, the only interesting game to be playing here is just to be with them and listen.
[00:52:32] Laura McKowen: Well, it should, this whole year showed so much of that. Cause it's like, oh, we don't have to go to work. We don't have to go to work to work. We don't have, we don't have to, you know, there's so much just in that, that broke. Now it's like, how many people, what's 80% or something of people are supposedly wanting to change jobs? What are they calling it? The Great Resignation.
[00:53:01] Rob Bell: All this new data people are going, I'm not going to do that anymore. Yeah.
[00:53:08] Laura McKowen: No hard pass.
[00:53:08] Rob Bell: No.
[00:53:12] Laura McKowen: Yeah. A lot of it is, malleable is a great word. I'm gonna use that. So much of what we're talking about, there's this center, the center of it is sort of possibility and abundance. Back to that just versus scarcity versus just really a locked system.
[00:53:32] Rob Bell: Yes. Yeah. And so this always ultimately, because everything is spiritual, there will always be these undertones, these animating energies that are actually just below the surface that are shaping everything. And so whenever the form, whenever the job, whenever the schedule, whenever the body, whenever it's like something's off here. Okay. Slow down, get quiet, follow it. Where does this come from? What is it? That's when you start seeing. You have to have the space. That's how it happens.
[00:54:16] Laura McKowen: There's one thing I want to just return to real quick about what you said. If you're paying attention, if you're really paying attention to your two kids or your three kids or whatever, you know, and you wouldn't have the anxiety about all the things that are not happening. There's a distorted, well, I think this is all related to this space, this idea of spaciousness and time and things unfolding. You know, at seven years sober, I was kind of laughing this morning as I was thinking, I thought when I got sober, like first year, I'm going to publish my book and I'm going to get out of debt and I'm going to find a new boyfriend and all these things.
[00:55:02] And it's like, Oh, oh, Laura. I'm so glad that all didn't happen. I would have exploded. None of that. I wouldn't have been able to appreciate it. It would have been crazy. None of that. Like I do appreciate the evolution of time and where I am now is the right thing that, that, that is. But a lot of people struggle against that hard. Like I should know better now, I'm this age. This should have happened.
[00:55:34] Rob Bell: Oh, wow. I've been thinking about this a little, a lot recently. How interesting you say that we create a template and then judge ourselves by this, whether or not where we've reached it or not, where we're at. When we created, we created the judge and...
[00:55:57] Laura McKowen: We don't think we created it though. It's like we take it as just the way things are as the truth, as the markers.
[00:56:06] Rob Bell: Right, right. And that's not, that's just not that interesting. It's interesting that you said about kids, the great American architect, Louis Kahn, before he would design a building would ask, what does this building want to be?
[00:56:24] So like with the kid, who does this kid want to be? That's the only interesting question. How can we help? What space does this kid need? Like even our three kids just listening, does this kid want to be..., oh, interesting. Excellent. Let's pay attention. Okay. Then let's follow that.
[00:56:51] Laura McKowen: Yeah. That's an entirely different life.
[00:56:53] Rob Bell: Yeah. And it begins with the assumption that there's an impelling force. There's a force coming up from within the kid, as opposed to needing the parent to place a whole thing on top of the kid. You're listening for what's arising from within. What does the kid naturally move? What are the patterns? What are the things they like to talk about? Where do they seem to be drawn? You're seeing what's in there.
[00:57:20] Laura McKowen: Yeah. Curious about what's in there instead of what needs to happen, what needs to be.
[00:57:29] Rob Bell: That's awesome.
[00:57:31] Laura McKowen: I want to make sure we're not, I don't know how long you plan to sit here,
[00:57:37] Rob Bell: You got to have at least another question on your notes there.
[00:57:45] Laura McKowen: I have lots of questions. Yeah. Okay. I've been thinking a lot about the beginning of my childhood or even in my twenties. I mean, I graduated college without a cell phone. There was no social media. It really was an entirely different world. And it feels like, in the past hundred years, the way that we live is truly entirely different. We've had several revolutions in there and I feel a lot that we're in a thing right now.
[00:58:19] We're in a moment, like a big spiritual, like you can hear this death rattle almost of old ways of being. It feels like polarization, a lot of fear, a lot of anxiety. And you can feel that as something that's just horrifying and terrifying and just doom and we're all just screwed and there's no hope, but if it's a death rattle and if death is the end of something and the beginning of something else, does that feel true to you?
[00:58:59] Rob Bell: For sure. Absolutely. And you could argue that very coherently from history and that doesn't mean that the train isn't coming off the rails, but so for example, think about what happened when someone realized that you could take sand and out of it, you could make glass and someone else realized you could take glass and put two pieces of glass in a tube and you could look through it and you could study the stars.
[00:59:27] And then somebody else discovered, oh, wait, the entire medieval world is built on a belief that the earth is the center of the solar system. So it wasn't just a belief about cosmology. The earth is a center and everything orbits around it. But that very nice, neat order then meant you had God, the angels, kings, landowners, slaves, like there was an entire order to what it meant to be a human being all the way from where you fit in the order, all the way to where the earth fits with the other planets.
[01:00:08] And then somebody takes sand, makes glass, puts glass in a tube. And it says, actually, it's not how it is. It's actually, the earth is like just another ball orbiting the sun and these massive institutions like the church fought this. And I mean, imagine your brain. Yeah. I imagine the upheaval of these ideas.
[01:00:44] The earth is not the center of the entire order of the world. Isn't what we were told. But then in a fairly narrow window from roughly the mid 17 hundreds to the mid 18 hundreds, human beings had slaves forever. And then in this one narrow hundredish year window you're nodding because you know exactly where I'm headed.
[01:01:06] Slavery gets pretty much out loud, everywhere on the planet. Yup. So you think about people's neural pathways, like, wait the earth, isn't the like, can you imagine what the, how much that would hurt your brain, that kind of upheaval. And then within a couple of hundred years you have things like slavery, you have the birth of democracy as we know it.
[01:01:40] Historically things happen that are massively disruptive. People die, power structures are assaulted and crumble, and it's disorienting at the deepest levels. And then out of it, new things emerge that just become how everybody is. Yeah. And so I would argue that for a number of people, take something like capitalism, etc. Those are arrangements. Like, how are we arranged? How does the public school system work? That's an arrangement. How do businesses think about their relationship to the earth and environmental sustainability? Those are all, it could, you could call them arrangements, but they're also actually trajectories.
[01:02:38] Yeah. So I think you're noticing that people that like some of the ways that our economy is set up, that isn't just an economic model that we happen to think is the best one. It all also goes somewhere. And if you keep doing that, if you keep making sure those people's taxes are that, and those people's taxes are that it actually goes somewhere.
[01:03:01] You know what I mean? It's actually a story as well as an arrangement and a number of these arrangements are actually beginning. The story is actually getting to get really, really dark and, and it's actually hurting a whole number of people. I think I'm going to write a book about this next thing that apocalypse doesn't mean an ending.
[01:03:26] It means a disclosure. Apocalypse means to be laid bare. And when it’s like, this feels apocalyptic. I think people generally say that to me. And it feels like everything's ending. It's like, no, no, no things are being revealed for what they truly are. And that's why this moment is so interesting . It's actually genuinely apocalyptic.
[01:03:49] Like we knew that there were a group of people who didn't want a whole other group of people in our country to vote because when those people vote, then those people lose their power. But they're now actually passing restrictive voting laws. So what we use to sense and kind of know is now actually just being brought out. So it's the worst thing ever, but actually almost has to be brought out like that. That's what we're living through.
[01:04:15] Laura McKowen: Yeah. And I think to me, this is helpful. It's hopeful.
[01:04:19] Rob Bell: That's why apocalypse always has an element of hope to it. If you see the larger trajectory, then when it's apocalyptic, Kristen, and I call it apocalyptic hope. It's a hope, but earned hope.
[01:04:31] God, it's the worst thing ever. People are genuinely being crushed. We're not minimizing any of that, but it's how you actually get to a new world.
[01:04:46] Laura McKowen: Right? It's necessary.
[01:04:49] Rob Bell: Yeah. And even, at times it can be very difficult to talk about because it sounds like you're minimizing the struggle of the pain of somebody, but we're actually just looking at larger patterns of how the whole thing actually does move forward.
[01:05:06] And it happens. My one son calls it the great unmasking. Something somewhere needed to be unmasked. You needed to see just who had their hands on the levers. You needed to see where the money was going, where the money was coming from. You needed to see what that person's motives were. Otherwise it all just sat below the surface and it was allowed to keep going.
[01:05:31] Laura McKowen: Yeah. Yeah. It feels that way to me too. And that wasn't intended for people who are less, like, whenever I feel a lot of despair, which I left social media for the time being, cause it would put me in that place. Yeah. I zoom out. I read some history.
[01:05:47] Rob Bell: Ah, yes. Oh, I like what you said, zoom out. I very much relate to that. Zoom out is a great way to put it. Zoom out. I love biographies and autobiographies. I love to read about somebody who had an idea and followed it and just kept following it. That, to me, I just couldn't enjoy. I mean, that's just so enjoyable.
[01:06:18] Laura McKowen: Yeah, so that was one thing I wanted to ask you, and then we can end there. Who are your teachers? Or who do you, what do you lean on? Who or what do you end up going back to, to get back to your center?
[01:06:31] Rob Bell: Honestly, Laura, for I don't know how many years, but teachers, somebody always showed up with whatever would help. So when I look back, there was always somebody who showed up at just the perfect moment and had the next thing. There's a bookstore where the outside of the bookstore is all bookshelves all the time. Like all those books are a dollar. And I came across this Zen master named Joko, whose writing just instantly captivated me or my son the other day, a couple of months ago.
[01:07:45] It was like, hey, this book of yours, somehow I got it. But here you can have it back. And he handed me a book I'd never seen before. And I was like, I don't know where this came from. I was like, I don't know where it came from this Danish seafaring novel by Karsten Jensen about a tiny coastal Danish town and something about that novel just did something to me.
[01:08:05] You know what I mean? I quite, even difficult to put into words or there is an Irish writer named Tana French who writes these. I don't know why I finished a book of hers last night, The Searcher. I just finished the third in the series, Faithful Place. There's something about how she portrays the interior, how the interior life of her narrator processes, the story that just always somebody who has something. I stopped trying to make direct, almost like pins and yarn on the wall. Like to connect. I stopped trying to figure out why certain things strike me and help and heal and do all, you know what I mean? You know what I'm talking about? Something about it speaks at some deeper level and then you just receive it and trust what comes.
[01:09:20] Laura McKowen: I totally get it. And words, books are usually where I find the next thing, a poem or a Tana French. When I read her, it was The Searchers I read.
[01:09:36] Rob Bell: Right, right, right. The mind behind it becomes terribly intriguing. Who is this person? It's very, very interesting to me how you get what you need when you need it. I'm moving a half step slower. I actually have come to see, I think moving that half step slower is a better way to be.
[01:10:08] I think there's a whole world when you're moving a half step slower that opens up, there's a whole world of pain and people. You experience and feel people's pain more. So it's not like it's all good. Cause suddenly you hear some when you're moving to half-step slower, you just see yeah, you see way more.
[01:10:32] You see how everything's revved up. You see what's empty. You see people running, you see all the wonder more, you see all of it, but you have to move slower, do less and move slower. And in my experience, you'll get more done, but it will be the kinds of things you actually want to be doing.
[01:10:51] Laura McKowen: It was so lovely to spend a little time with you.
[01:10:53] Rob Bell: I thoroughly enjoyed it. Great questions. Thanks.
[01:11:04] Laura McKowen: Alright, thank you so much for being with us today. If you want more TMST head on over to tmstpod.com and become a member. Members get access to the full uncut versions of these conversations, previews of upcoming guests, invites to join me for members only events, and access to our members only community where I hang out a lot, especially now that I'm not on social media. We decided from the beginning to make this an independent project, we don't have sponsors and we don't run ads.
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