Christina: [00:00:00] My name is Christina Crook, and I am the author of The Joy of Missing Out. I want to welcome you to the JOMOcast, a podcast for founders and creators seeking joy in a digital age. JOMO is the joy of missing out on the right things. Things like toxic hustle, comparison, and digital drain to make space for life-giving commitments that bring us peace, meaning, and joy.

Today on the JOMOcast. I'm speaking with Sarah Selecky. Sarah is the author of the novel Radiant Shimmering Light and the short story collection This Cake Is for The Party, which was a finalist for the Giller Prize, shortlisted for the Commonwealth Book Prize, and long listed for the Frank O'Connor International Short Story award.[00:01:00] 

She earned her MFA from the University of British Columbia. In 2011, she founded the Sarah Selecky Writing School, which has become a creative community for more than 13,000 writers from around the world. She lives in Prince Edward county, Ontario, Canada. I hope you enjoy this episode: the joy of being amazed.

Welcome Sarah. 

Sarah: Hi Christina. 

Christina: Where am I speaking with you from today? 

Sarah: I am in my office, in my home in Prince Edward County, outside of Toronto on Anishnaabeg, Wendat, and Haudenosaunee territories. 

Christina: Amazing. Also known as the Sky Barn. 

Sarah: Sky Barn. Yes. In our barn, sky barn. 

Christina: Amazing. I want to talk about the sky barn and how you and I met in a little bit, but first I want to just do a couple rapid fire questions.

Are you ready? 

Sarah: Yes. Ready. 

Christina: [00:02:00] Okay. On a Saturday afternoon, where can we find you? 

Sarah: I call them Sarah days. Probably either cooking something in the kitchen or reading on the couch. 

Christina: What gets you up Monday morning?

Sarah: Knowing that I'm actually, don't have to check my inbox. I have a Monday morning block. So getting up on Monday morning is a little bit of an extended weekend where I can catch up on reading and just knowing that I don't have to be anywhere, gets me up. It's weird. 

Christina: No, that does not sound weird. That sounds like magical. I want to talk more about that in a bit. Okay. What's one thing people wouldn't know if they followed you online, 

Sarah: where I am or what I'm doing right now, because. Okay. What wouldn't they know if they just looked at my past posts? I don't know if they'd know that I'm sitting on a roundy ball and don't have any chairs in my desk and that I sit on the floor most of the time when I'm working. 

Christina: I know you're working on a computer or not on a computer when you're on the ground.[00:03:00] 

Sarah: Mix and match. I mix and match.

Christina: Okay. This is like a sign of how limber you are. We're learning more and more about you. Okay. And what's your favorite thing to do unplugged? 

Sarah: All my favorite things to do are unplugged. I love knitting. I do. I love knitting. 

Christina: Amazing. Now we all have a window into the world of Sarah Selecky. So today we are going to talk about the joy of being amazed.

And I feel like our whole relationship is based on wonder. It has amazed me from the start. I thought we could talk a little bit about our amazing journey to become friends. 

Sarah: Let's do. What do you remember? Where did it start? 

Christina: Well, I remember getting an email or did you get the email from Bill Weaver?

Sarah: I spoke to Bill Weaver.

So Bill told me about you, 

Christina: but then he emailed me. 

Sarah: I may have asked him for an e-connection. So Bill Weaver is my dear friend's stepfather. He also runs Media that Matters out of Hollyhock on Cortez Island. So I know him [00:04:00] as a friend, but I know that he also has like professional connections to people in my network, but I've never worked with him professionally.

Christina: And Bill Weaver came to my book launch in Victoria, just completely randomly. I don't even know how he ended up there, but it was many, many moons ago and that's where him and I met and he felt that we should know one another. 

Sarah: Yeah. 

Christina: And so somehow by email, we connected and you invited me to lunch at sky barn and I was a stranger.

Sarah: Yeah. I was teaching at Hollyhock on Cortez island a few summers back. And in conversation with Bill, we were just talking about everything as we do. And he told me about you and your work and that you were in Toronto. He was like, oh, she's in Toronto. He just connected us. And I was like the joy of missing out.

Yes, please. Why don't I know this person. Hello. Um, please introduce us. And I just knew, I just did a brief web search and was like, why don't I know her already. Okay. Come on over. We have to talk. 

Christina: And so I drove three hours to have lunch with you and you prepared [00:05:00] the most beautiful meal and you sat in Sky Barn and we went for a walk.

I remember, and I got to meet your partner. And it was a truly amazing day. 

Sarah: It was, I felt that immediately. I could tell you anything. You already understood like books of history of language and atmospheric tendencies and desires and fears and everything that sort of is like bubbling around in my head all the time.

I felt like you already knew all of that and had indeed written the book on it. And we could just start from step one was very deep. There was very little small talk. 

Christina: I wonder, I just love that our relationship started that way, which is a perfect segue into our topic today about the joy of being amazed.

And I wanted to talk to you about, I have a friend who's a scientist in Europe, and she has a hypothesis, which is that the internet is fake wonder. I know when she said that I had the same reaction, I gasped. Oh my [00:06:00] God. 

Sarah: Let's talk more about that. What else does she say? Well, 

Christina: I was going to say that that's a problem because Aristotle writes that out of wonder, comes joy that we need true wonder, right.

Is a pathway into joy. She's writing a book about this right now, and I'm so eager to hear her findings, but I'm curious of what is your relationship to wonder and how does it fuel your work? 

Sarah: So I recently heard, and I wish I could remember who said this, but I heard this year that the difference between curiosity and wonder is worth noting.

And when there's curiosity, you are looking for the solution to the problem. You're curious about what the end result is. You're curious about getting there. So the curiosity is fueling it's motivating, it's delightful and delicious, and it's definitely like full of uncertainty and has a lot of the signatures of wonder.

The difference is wonder, there is no solution. It's not about being curious to square that circle. How are you going to do it? There is no square. [00:07:00] And so the delight is in that release. And for me, it just feels like the best times of my life. That like moments of deepest insight and joy. Yes. Joy have been periods where I have just unbuckled, like unfastened the need to solve the need to make the need, to do the need, to make a point of something. And in the unfastening and in the unbuckling, wonder sort of emerges and it's so much bigger than any problem and any solution. It's a release. It's like a sweet surrender that is not like falling to your knees, giving up surrender.

It's more of a surrender of like, thinking about anything at all, just receiving. And that for me is like at the source of, I think why I make things, why I write things, how I feel when it's good. How I feel about having made anything or what what's fueling the creativity. Like there's a piece of the source of [00:08:00] creation, even though I'm showing up and, you know, coming up with some ideas here and there there's a fuel underneath it.

There's like a force that's running underneath it. That is unthinkable inexpressible, and wonder is connected to that for me. 

I wanted to talk about the delight of not knowing because we are in a culture of knowing of controlling of strategy and planning.

[00:10:00] And I don't think we hear a lot-- I know that this is extremely present in your work and in your teaching, but I don't think in the culture, we hear a lot about the joy or delight of not knowing. I think that's so true what you're saying. And I know that's true in my experience of writing in particular of the not knowing, the joy of the not knowing, of what the next word will be or what the next piece of the puzzle will be, and that openness and trust in the process and not just sitting with it. It's like, it's not a boredom. It's like an attentiveness and openness, like you're saying yes. Like, I don't know, but like please tell me. 

Sarah: Yeah. And I might never know, like, that's the piece that I think just switches it from curiosity. Like I think what motivates.

Like, I'm so curious about your friend, the scientist, who's writing about this because what would a scientist say about this? I mean, there's so much of the pursuit of knowledge in our sciences. [00:11:00] And I think that the shadow of that, or the other side of the coin, I'm not going to label it light or shadow. I don't know.

But the other side of the coin of wanting to get to the bottom of things is knowing how much you don't know. The scientists, I love reading are the ones who are kind of also delighted in their pursuit of knowledge, who are also delighted in how much they don't know and the possibility, you know, like 

Christina: I love them so. They're like, I know this to be true, but mostly I don't. I know this to be true, but all of these other things, there's no way to be sure of. And just the humility of that. 

Sarah: Yeah. And then there's like some reverence there because it's not all up to you. It's not all up to you. I don't know what the other component is, the X factor, but you can't do it all. So then what, then it becomes like an imaginary playmate. It becomes like a collaboration with some energy force. It becomes just like randomness and mystery. 

I'm looking at trees out my window [00:12:00] right now and it's just like, making me think of this. I hope this illustrates something. When I was a kid, when I was really little, I remember the first moment where I made the connection that tree branches look like capillaries and veins, like the leaves are all gone and you're like gazing up at the trees. They look like parts of your body in the anatomy books. And I was like, what? Like the first time that hit me, I was like, oh my God. And then seeing that rivers also look like this, like, oh my God, what, why is this so? You know, even as an adult, I still have that reverence and I still don't know why that's the case. I remember learning fractals, it's the geometry of nature. And there's like so much study around how these things work and the metaphor is very real, but when it comes down to like, why, We don't know why.

Right. That's wonder that's amazement. Like, I don't know. I don't know. I don't know.[00:13:00] 

Christina: Why do you think being amazed is a good burden? 

Sarah: What a great question. Oh my gosh. Amazement is one of those quantities like love. That's the first thing I thought when you asked about a good burden, because I immediately think about relationships and love and what you wrote about love in your book and in a similar way, it's an infinite capacity for amazement.

In fact, holding amazement is sort of an oxymoron. It's like a paradox because I think when I am experiencing amazement, when I am amazed, I understand that I actually am not the capacity. I'm not the holder. It's not about my capacity. There's something else that I'm part of that I'm in, I'm in some other kind of burden in the capacity way.

Like I'm part of something. It's not something that I'm holding. And I suppose that's like that just twists my brain inside out a little bit, but it is similar in love. It's like, it's something we tend and something that we're part of. [00:14:00] And it's a force that expands exponentially and infinitely. It's not a limited substance and it kind of can turn your head upside down when you think about that as well. Just again, culturally, because of the culture we live in, everything is measured in this other way as something to be produced, measured, or like part of a transaction. So anything that doesn't fit in that has the capacity to turn our brains inside out a little bit. 

Christina: It does.

So I asked Sarah to choose a chapter or a favorite chapter from good burdens and she chose Be Amazed. So that's why we're framing this conversation around this theme for today, but I want to get just a little bit practical about things and talk a bit about Sarah, because Sarah is an incredibly multifaceted human being.

She writes the most mind-bending beautiful and brilliant novels, and also runs an international writing school online. So she is like a world [00:15:00] class creative entrepreneur and also a creative writer. And I want to know how wonder comes into play, because I think it's a really obvious for people on the writing side or not, maybe not obvious, but more obvious, but I want to hear about how wonder comes into play in the practicalities of running your business.

Can we talk about that a little bit?

Sarah: Yeah, I love that you asked this question, like, who asks me this question? There was one point at the beginning of running this business and it just felt amazing to me that I put something out there and people would come and then they would have an experience and it would support us and put food on the table.

And then I could like have an idea and put it out there. I mean, there is something very creative about being an entrepreneur. I mean, it's not that different from writing a book in some ways, except you're the protagonist and all those people you work with are your characters. It's undeniably creative work.

So I think there's still that element of [00:16:00] collaboration with something. Showing up and doing your due diligence and showing up with your craft, your skill, your practice. And then also leaving space for something like it's not entirely in your control again, that could be a source of great insecurity and fear.

And sometimes it is, I'll be honest, it's like scary. And it's also the joy of creative work. So it's no different in the business. Of course it's different because it's not all in my imagination. But I remember when I first first started feeling like, oh my God, this is in my imagination. Like, I'm just bicycling up here in the clouds, in the air.

And like real things are happening in the physical world around me. It feels the same as drawing a drawing or writing a story. Yeah. Do you feel that way? Do you feel like there are moments where it's like you're making something up? 

Christina: Oh yeah, definitely. And when I'm attentive to that, To the fact that it is joyful, that there is wonder, and I feel creative.

I am being creative. When, [00:17:00] I'm attentive to that. It's so much more enjoyable. 

Sarah: It's a practice, isn't it? Because I mean, there's pleasure. There's joy. There's present. And there's an exercise. Well, part of every writing exercise, but there's a particular exercise that I advise writers to come back to whenever they feel like a little bit caught up in their mind, like a little bit too cerebral.

Stuck or worried about what am I going to write next? I don't have, like, I don't know what's going to happen next or there any sorts of things that stop a writer and give them like a momentary block. I'm not talking about bigger blocks of like trauma or major resistance. Although this may work for that this does work for that as well. But the exercise that I advise people to go back to is to focus on something very small and exact, and just describe it in detail, using your five senses. And in any scene that you're in, or if you're starting the page and you're starting, if you're writing memoir, it doesn't matter if it's memoir it's fiction, just focus on a detail, the edge of a table, this little pebble that is under your [00:18:00] character's toe, your characters toe, or you know, what, whatever, something, and describe it in detail.

And for a writer, what you're doing by describing in detail is creating a scene. You're building a. But what happens, I think to your nervous system, when you're doing that is that you get, you get grounded, you come back to your body, you tune into your five senses, you pick something and then that focus and attention to a detail becomes more manageable, I guess it's like a baby step of attention. And in anything we do in, in running a business, I think there's also like a place where we can get really caught up in the gears, in the mechanisms, in the things we should or shouldn't do in the spreadsheets, in all the people, in the HR and the team.

And like the there's so much out there that can get you off track and coming back to focus on a single detail of something that is real and true. It's not even that you love it and it gives you joy because those things like a spreadsheet can give you joy if you're in the right frame of mind, right? Like answering emails in your inbox, one at a [00:19:00] time, those are all people who are like either asking something from you because they respect you or offering you something because they respect you.

Like each task in an inbox is a great thing to have. It's just when we look at all of it and we think we have to be something that we aren't now to face it, it gets really angsty and we can get blocked. So that focusing on something small and exact translates, also, for example, when you're looking at a spreadsheet, you can be like, okay, I'm going to turn every one of these rows pale pink. 

Christina: That's not where I thought you were going. 

Sarah: And my point is this, that it doesn't matter what it is, that the capacity to get grounded first in something that is laced with your attention. So the practice of paying attention then does something to your nervous system, where you can like be present.

And then from presence, you can feel some pleasure. And that in itself, that is the practice.

Christina: [00:20:00] I feel like you've already touched on this, but I've read that wonder is the opposite of stress. And my question for you is can wonder be a counterbalance to the digital stress we feel on a daily basis. 

Sarah: Yes. 

Christina: And how? You started to talk about ways we could do it right in the digital environment. I'd love for you to kind of talk a bit more about that and maybe ways that you engage in wonder to find that balance. 

Sarah: For me connecting to things that I loved as a child is a pretty good bridge and conduit for me. And so if I can connect to the little kid, Sarah, I think it changes something in my mind. And by changing something in my mind, I mean, becoming receptive, like not knowing everything and knowing that I don't know everything and not being expected that of myself, because I'm just a kid.

I think that that does something to my experience of wonder in the world. And it adds a little bit of spaciousness. Like we all [00:21:00] have access to that all the time. And for me, I just, I really, really appreciate having time, time alone. Let's just say solitude. Let's just call it what it is. Time alone. Even just focusing on something small and exact that's like a house plant, or if it's winter, like a snowflake melting.

What I tell my writers to do is let the is-ness of the thing into you as though you want to remember this thing three years from now. At any given moment we have access to do that. It just means quieting the noise long enough that you can like open something in your brain. I'm not a neuroscientist. I don't, I don't know what the neuroscience says about this, but in my experience, it feels like quieting the noise down long enough that I can open some kind of field or space in my brain where I can imprint the is-ness of one or more of my physical senses, my five senses, [00:22:00] as though I wanted to remember it three years from now. And then that imprinting, I kind of dissolve, like, I think it's an ego dissolve. I might be like activating the right side of your brain and putting the left side of your brain offline for awhile. It might be doing something like biologically that I don't understand, but, 

Christina: That makes me sorry to interrupt, but it makes me think of the joy of self forgetfulness.

Sarah: Yeah. Well, it's gone like for a second you're, for a second, you're gone. For a second by letting in the snowflake-- the is-ness of that snowflake-- you actually, your consciousness becomes the snowflake for a second. And, you know, as a writer, I, we get to do this, a writer actually could then, you know, right. From the point of view of a snowflake, like literally could make that magic happen, but you don't even have to do that.

You can just at any given moment when you really let in a detail or an outline of a rock, or really try to remember, like right now you can do it right now and be like in the space where you're at. If there's a window open, even if there's not. What is the quality of light in the room that you're [00:23:00] in right now.

And just take a minute to, like, you want to remember this quality of light. You want to remember like how light it is, where the shadows are, the feeling from the lamps or the window three years from. It's like click something, your whole body kind of absorbs it. And it doesn't matter if you're going to remember it three years from now or not. What happens in that moment is that I think you forget that you're separate from the light in your room for a second. 

Christina: Yeah. I love all the things you're saying. I got to thinking about, how, when we're in a posture, we even just practically ask ourselves this question. Like, I wonder if, or I wonder what will happen when we're trying to control things, whether it's in our creative practice or in our business, coming to it in the posture of wonder of, I wonder, I wonder what will happen.

Sets us up to be amazed, right? Because we're acknowledging that not all things are in our [00:24:00] control and very practically you and I were talking even before we started recording today about a situation professional situation I'm in right now. And when I think of that challenging situation, I'm in from a place of wonder, like, I wonder what will happen, then I feel like I'm setting myself up for amazement.

Sarah: Yes. Oh my gosh. You are. And if I was in an anxious place right now, I wonder what would happen could also be a real fear trigger, right? Because there's like, there's a chance that something bad would happen and there's a chance that something good would happen. I think there's like, yeah, 

Christina: there's a vulnerability. 

Sarah: There's a real vulnerability there.

And I think the practice, again, the like the burden, maybe the good burden here is to continually remind ourselves. Cause we do have this negativity bias. We all run with that, running to remind ourselves as a practice that something great could happen. There's like a 50, 50 chance. I don't know what the percentage is, but there's a chance that something even better than we could have hoped for would [00:25:00] happen as a result.

Like a phone call could come in or, you know, the sun beam could crack open, even though it's a cloudy day, like anything could happen. And we're setting ourselves up for amazement if we can do the practice or that have the discipline to create more calm so that we can not let the negativity bias kind of take us away.

You know, it feels like that goes without us, even it's like a default. Like we don't, if I don't train myself, you know, kind of continually, I think that my bias towards anxiety would take over.

Christina: That's such a good point.

This is the Jomo cast where we explore how embracing the joy of missing out on the right things helps us thrive in the digital age. How would you define Jomo or what does JOMO mean to you? 

Sarah: Oh my gosh. So after reading Good Burdens this summer, so it's been a couple months now. I took a break from Instagram. I removed the app from my phone, which I [00:26:00] do periodically, but it had been awhile.

I posted a picture of my advanced reader copy of Good Burdens. And, and I was like, “bye, everybody read this book.” So the joy of missing out to me is this feeling it's like, there's so much more spaciousness in my mind. I feel like I can think about and reflect on things that I choose to think and reflect on more than having you know, the clutter of other noise in my mind that you know, is interesting to sort through, but without it, I feel like I get to think about what I want to think about remembering that has been such a gift and a joy. So I'm missing out on all the noise and the clutter. 

At the same time, there's this feeling of like, like a pressure of containment, like I'm in a container where the walls are elastic-y like pressure. They're not hard walls. They're like, I can feel the pressures of what wants to come in that I'm holding the boundary [00:27:00] against. And maybe over time, maybe with a few more weeks, the consistency of those walls of protection will thicken up a little bit and become less stretchy.

But right now it just feels like part of the joy of missing out is knowing how much strength and courage it's taking to hold those boundaries. Like, it feels like things want in and the joy of missing out is this like, ah, keeping it out. Like it's not just a subtraction and then it all falls away from me.

And I think partly that's because I'm like you, like I'm in a world, in a business. And like the online world is very much a part of my community. It's part of how I interact with my team. It's part of how I interact with my work, my livelihood. It's not like I can, I don't have a work computer that I leave at home and then come back and like spend time with my family. It's much more entangled. So perhaps that's part of it, but it's not easy. 

The joy of missing out is both that feeling of freshness. And it's [00:28:00] also a practice that is like going to the gym, kind of like I got to keep these muscles strong by lifting heavy things or pressing against the walls a little bit to make sure that I protect my space from the content that could encroach over that threshold. 

Christina: Thanks so much for being with me today, Sarah.

Sarah: Thank you so much for this conversation. I love it.