On the Anxiety of Trying To Know Everything
May Newsletter
Dear writers,
Today, in lieu of a word from our Dean, we want to offer a vignette from
(excerpted from an interview with Marketing for Hippies) on depth vs. growth:
News from Anna
Does anyone else feel like Substack is turning into this Portlandia spoof?
There are so many articles out there—and many of them are genuinely worthy of our attention—that it can be easy to feel like we’ll miss something important if we don’t read all the `stacks.
But if we are to keep our sanity and live a life that allows us to engage with people and the world deeply, there’s nothing for it: we have to choose to be limited.
For those of us who are writers, the problem is compounded: because we need to reserve significant energy for deep creative work, we have to guard against spreading ourselves too thin. We have to guard against reading every article, taking every class, and participating in every community that may ignite our imagination or give us the missing craft knowledge to finally get unstuck with our writing. We can’t let ourselves fall into the trap of “Did you read? Did you read? Did you read?” Nor can we let ourselves fall into the related trap of producing “content” as a success metric (“Did you write? Did you write? Did you write?”).
We have to be purposefully small if we are to grow deep roots. We have to make conscious decisions to limit our focus if we are to create anything worthy of attention. To quote Martin Shaw again, “I recognize beauty in the limit of my choices as I age, because in limit I recognize depth, and depth is a doorway to beauty.”
This is why St. Basil Writers’ Workshop exists.
We are carefully curating the best advice from the best writing instructors within a small, tight-knit community of talented writers to foster the limitations you need to flourish creatively.
Today, these curated resources focus on simplicity and trust.
Live a Smaller Life and Find Peace
What’s more anxiety-inducing than trying to know everything? Fr. Seraphim of Mull Monastery has wise words for those of us living in the internet age:
“I would much rather we all were simply humble enough to acknowledge that we cannot in any meaningful, practical way correct the world or change the world for the better. What we can do is enclose ourselves within the limits of our small lives and correct and embetter ourselves.”
If you want a glimpse of the small, focused creative community we’re fostering at St. Basil’s, you can check out our Story Hearth writing community, where our Dean, Dn. Nicholas, is currently offering a series on what it means to cultivate a lifestyle conducive to deep writing.
Until next time, writing friends.
From your resident small fry,
It takes a certain risk to live a smaller life, a risk to trust that, in turning away from the vast horizon of ambient digital noise, we are not missing out on the essential, which is always right in front of us, in the next step.
My goodness, what a timely reminder. The resistance required to swim against the frenetic current telling us to churn out content and push to grow big is very hard to remember and sustain.