This is The Nooner, a short daily (Monday - Saturday) newsletter slash podcast that has its very own section within Dispatches from Inner Space.
Every Sunday, I publish the Dispatches Weekly Digest (DWD), which lets you binge all the Nooners from the previous week. It also includes a meaningful song recommendation, and a short segment I call TMI, where I go off script to bring you backstage, so to speak.
Two more things about the DWD:
It goes on on the main Dispatches channel, so if you’re looking to spare your inbox from the daily emails without missing out on anything, you can specifically unsubscribe from The Nooner section, and still get the Digest on Sunday.
It’s only available to paid subscribers.
The Dispatches Weekly Digest is a labor of love, and I’m really proud of it, and if you want to hear it, I want you to hear it. So, if you can afford it…
And if you can’t, but you still think of yourself as one of my true fans, let me know and we’ll work something out.
Ideas are not scarce
Because we are default hardwired to a scarcity mindset, it’s worth making the case for abundance as often as possible.
Which is why I have to point out a certain phenomenon that always manages to astound me, no matter how often it repeats itself.
Ever since I can remember, I’ve always had a vague anxiety that I might one day run out of ideas. Whether it’s for short stories, screenplays, novels, essays, daily newsletter slash podcast posts -- doesn’t matter. Lurking in the back of my mind is the fear that one day the material will just dry up.
This is the main reason I wrote the post about ideas not being Pokémon pretty early on. If you’re afraid you’ll run out of ideas one day, you’d better be real diligent about catching as many as you can -- preferably all of them -- before that happens.
But this has never been even a remotely accurate reflection of reality.
The reality is that when I started the Nooner, I had approximately 45 items in a list I keep called “Essay Ideas.”
Now, 60 posts later, can you guess how many items are on that list, waiting their turn?
More than 60.
The more I write, the more ideas I have. And I have NOT been diligent about catching Pokémon.
This is clearly a loaves and fishes situation. It occurs to me that might have been the whole point of that miracle. Jesus sat down with a whole bunch of hungry people and said what have you got. And they, locked into the default scarcity mindset, were like, “definitely not enough.” And he said, well let’s see. So they brought him a couple of fish and like a piece of bread and said, “See?” And then he said tell you what, why don’t you go ahead and break the bread and cut up the fish and just start passing it around and we’ll see what happens.
And you know how the story ends. After everyone had eaten enough, there were whole *baskets* of food left over.
How did Jesus do it? Doesn’t matter. What matters is that whenever we’re afraid there won’t be enough, we’re wrong.
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