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.
What does it mean to be precious?
It means to cling to something tightly. To identify with it to the degree that if it is damaged or lost, you yourself feel damaged or lost.
In writing school (the school I’ve been going to since I was a kid, and also actual creative writing classes and the MFA I got in screenwriting I’ll probably delete this) they teach you not to be precious with anything you write. The objective is to stay objective.
Not being precious means you’re willing to change the story (or the essay, or whatever) for the sake of getting to the best version of itself. Being precious with any part of it means that you’ll fight to make sure it stays in regardless of whether it serves the higher purpose of the thing you’re writing, even if it is actively undermining or damaging or even destroying it.
So they say, don’t be precious, kill your darlings, etc. Because as long as you’re being precious, you can’t even see clearly. You don’t know whether the thing you’re holding onto so tightly is good or bad for the work. All you know is you won’t let go. And because you won’t let go, you’ll spend a lot of energy defending and justifying your precious thing to anyone who challenges it, including and especially the quiet, wiser parts of your own self that challenge it.
The only way to avoid preciously clinging to something, the only way to let go and regain that critical objectivity, is to literally disassociate from your work. You must consciously acknowledge and accept that your work is not YOU. You are so much vaster and more complex and frankly infinite than this little thing to which you cling so tightly. And if you are not that thing, then letting it go won’t hurt you. Fundamentally cannot hurt you.
This is not only true for creative work, it’s true for everything. Living in a consumerist culture has trained us to be precious with our consumption. We have been conditioned to believe that we are what we eat, figuratively and literally. So choose wisely! And once you’ve chosen, defend viciously.
Thus, we make ourselves very, very small. Tragically small.
And so vulnerable! So easy to break. To hurt us, to destroy us, one only needs to hurt or destroy our precious possessions.
The transition from pitiful vulnerability to glorious invincibility is as simple as waking up to the truth that we are neither what we make, nor what we consume. We are infinitely more. And so, as beings of glory, we may pick up and put down whatever we will, unhurt by the vicissitudes of life that ceaselessly threaten all those smaller things.
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