The world is teeming with newsletters vying for your email address and your attention. To help you decide whether you want to give me permission to turn up in your inbox roughly monthly, this is what kind of newsletter I intend mine to be:
- It’s from me, Emily. I choose the words in it to help me and you think properly about stuff.
- It’s about taking an experimental attitude towards everything, including myself, and listening carefully for the answers that come—and then doing something with the answers. I’d love it if it ever prompted you to do something—even something as small as getting out a notebook.
- It’s about any and all of the things I find interesting, because variety is what arises from anti-extremist curiosity.
- It’s about the existential questions (which are basically the same for everyone) and about the practical answers (which are radically different for everyone).
- It’s about respecting the complexities of life, the universe, and everything, and also not making things more complicated than they need to be.
- It’s about not wasting the tiny amount of time we have until we’re dead—and also not falling for the lie that being productive is how to not waste it.
- It may occasionally pull out the rug from under some sacred cow, because we need to be willing to do that.
- It’s written in full paragraphs with sparing use of boldface because I trust you to have an attention span.
- It takes none of this too terribly seriously, for, after all, this is only a little email mailing list thing!
If you sign up, I’ll share with you a step-by-step guide to doing a “weekly review”: a once-a-week pause to review the week that’s been and preview and plan for the one ahead. This tool encapsulates some of what I want the newsletter to be and do, so I hope it makes for a nice instant taster.
If any of this resonates, then I look forward to writing to you soon!
Emily T. Troscianko 