Going deep

Pick one thing and go deep. I’ve seen that advice over the past few days in my notes, and I keep skipping past that particular advice knowing how difficult it is for me to both pick one thing and go deep. Yesterday I decided to list all of the nonfiction books I’ve thought about writing in the past couple years and I’m too embarrassed to record the total number of unwritten books on that list.

But what does it mean to “go deep”? It doesn’t have to mean spending years in isolation preparing a manuscript.

One of the unwritten books on my list is called The Transmission. How has Buddhism survived for 2,500 years starting with the idea of suffering and the cessation of suffering? The core idea of enlightenment in itself is so difficult to articulate. And yet the practice has spread across the world, from culture to culture, carried by men and women who have given up their worldly concerns. How does an idea like this spread for millennia without becoming something different? As I am now, that is a question beyond my reach, but it would be a fantastic book if I could write it.

Going deep, here, doesn’t mean committing years of my life to writing that one book. It means letting the book stay unwritten so I can focus on pieces of the total story day after day. Going deep means I develop depth within myself, and I do that by coming back to the pieces I can write today, and tomorrow, and beyond.

That’s “going deep” sorted. Pick one thing? That’s going to take some work to pin down.