Hi, I’m Sara, and this is Tiny Revolutions, a weekly-ish dispatch of personal writing and links about becoming who you are. Reply anytime, I love to hear from you.
For those of you who’ve been reading this newsletter for a while, you might remember that I’ve been talking about starting a podcast. It’s been kind of a saga, really.
I got all the tools and software, recruited some amazing guests, created a concept/logo/descriptor/landing page/etc, talked about it in this newsletter multiple times, did a couple of test runs with some kind volunteers, even practiced editing an episode. Got lots of pep talks from friends and collaborators.
Didn’t start the podcast.
Talked about it some more. Got more encouragement.
Didn’t start the podcast.
Gave myself some time off from thinking about it and removed all pressure from myself to start the podcast.
Did not start the podcast!
This may come as a shock, but I… still have not started the podcast. I’m not sure I ever will. I tell you this not because I think you care about whether I’m starting the podcast. I highly doubt you do, but that was never really the point.
The point was that I wanted to do it and it sounded like fun. But I didn’t end up doing it because, well, I don’t know. I really don’t. I had it all lined up, I just couldn’t make myself pull the trigger.
Maybe I didn’t actually want to do it and was just telling myself I did because it sounded cool and because lots of people are starting podcasts. Or maybe I did want to do it but it just wasn’t the right time. Or, and I really don’t think this is the case, but maybe on some level I was afraid of “failing” at it, whatever that means.
It could be that I simply lost interest. Or that there’s some other reason that I’m not even aware of.
OK, so? So. That’s it.
In years past I would have been mortified to have talked such a big game about doing something and then not actually done it. I would have called myself a loser extraordinaire and berated myself for days, weeks, months, years, decades? Who knows. It would have been a long time.
It seems so much clearer to me now that it actually doesn’t matter. It doesn’t make me a better or worse person. It doesn’t mean I won’t do it at some point in the future. I can imagine all I want that hosting a podcast would have been some kind of ticket to fame and fortune or whatever, but that doesn’t have anything to do with reality. That’s just a story. Maybe it would have. Probably it wouldn’t.
Either way, I’d still be me. And I’m OK with that.
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Read on for some things I thought were worth sharing this week. And a lot of exclamation points!
Zen quote time!
“Human purposes are pursued within an immense circling universe which does not seem to me to have purpose, in our sense, at all. Nature is much more playful than purposeful, and the probability that it has no special goals for the future need not strike one as a defect.”
- Alan Watts in “This is It”
This guy!
"I myself don't like to be cheered on by others. I get upset when people simply tell me keep on trying. When someone is trying to do something, I think the best thing to do is to help lower the bar for them by staying at their side," he explains.
'Rent-a-person who does nothing' in Tokyo receives endless requests, gratitude
“So I kept going. I got addicted to it, because it felt good, gooder than any good I’d previously known. Hence why you could, yes, call it a compulsion. The craving, the all-consuming hunger for feeling good did not go anywhere. If anything it grew, grew out of and beyond the minuscule and fleeting good alcohol provided to a much larger and consistent good. A quantitative, not qualitative, difference.”
I loved this essay by Bobby Brazen about how and why he stopped drinking. One of the things that has been most surprising to me is how much better you feel when you leave alcohol behind. It’s shocking, really. Nice to see someone else talk about it.
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Lyrics of the Week
Even though I'm losing
Doesn't make me a loser (yet!)
Group Work Sessions!
Thanks to all of you who responded favorably to last week’s call for interest in attending group working sessions via Zoom. It’s looking like I’m going to offer one on Tuesday at 7:00 pm PT and one on Thursday at 8:00 am PT. I’ll message everyone who expressed interest with details — if that’s you and you haven’t gotten in touch yet, just hit reply and let me know.
A Tiny Assignment
Are you still mad at yourself for not doing that thing you said you’d do? Let it go.
😘
Sara
p.s. Thank you for reading! If you enjoyed this, share it with a friend.