The supreme good is like water,
which nourishes all things without trying to.
It is content with the low places that people disdain.
Thus it is like the Tao.
In dwelling, live close to the ground.
In thinking, keep to the simple. -“Tao Te Ching” by Lao Tzu (Stephen Mitchell translation)
“Humility isn’t thinking less of yourself. It’s thinking of yourself less often.” -C.S. Lewis
“Replace writing for attention, traffic, shares, and moola with writing for one person. See how your motivation to show up to your practice changes. See how your enjoyment shifts. See how much more writing means to you.” -Emily Rudow
… Well, I guess I was wrong, I just don’t belong
But then I’ve been there before
Everything’s all right, I’ll just say good night
And I’ll show myself to the door
Hey, I didn’t mean to cause a big scene
Just give me an hour and then
Well, I’ll be as high as that ivory tower
That you’re livin’ in
… ‘Cause I’ve got friends in low places
Where the whiskey drowns and the beer chases my blues away
And I’ll be OK
Yeah, I’m not big on social graces
Think I’ll slip on down to the oasis
Oh, I’ve got friends in low places -song “Friends In Low Places” by Garth Brooks
The below story about a letter exchange between author Cheryl Strayed and Elissa Bassist is magnificent and truly defines humility (h/t to Billy Oppenheimer for providing)…
In 2010, Cheryl Strayed received a letter from a woman named Elissa Bassist, cataloging her doubts and anxieties. She worried that she writes “like a girl.” That she’d never be as good a writer as David Foster Wallace. That she’d forever be “sick with panic that I cannot—will not—override my limitations, insecurities, jealousies, and ineptitude.” And that she’d “eventually collapse in a heap of ‘I could have been better than this.’” In her own long period of self-loathing, convinced she too would never measure up to her favorite writers, Strayed replied: on a chalkboard in her living room, “I wrote, ‘The first product of self-knowledge is humility,’ Flannery O’Connor.” “Do you know what that is?” she asked Bassist. “To be humble? The word comes from the Latin words humilis and humus. To be down low. To be of the earth. To be on the ground. That’s where I went.” She lowered herself to possibility of writing a “mediocre,” “never-going-to-be-published,” “nowhere-in-league-with-the-writers-I’d-admired-so-much-that-I-practically-memorized-their-sentences” book. “It was only then,” only when she lowered the stakes, “only when I humbly surrendered, that I was able to do the work I needed to do.” She suggested that Bassist get a chalkboard and write the words “humility” and “surrender” on it. “That’s what I think you need to find and do to get yourself out of the funk you’re in. The most fascinating thing to me about your letter is that buried beneath all the anxiety and sorrow and fear and self-loathing, there’s arrogance at its core. It presumes you should be successful at twenty-six, when really it takes most writers so much longer to get there. It laments that you’ll never be as good as David Foster Wallace—a genius, a master of the craft—while at the same time describing how little you write. You loathe yourself, and yet you’re consumed by the grandiose ideas you have about your own importance. You’re up too high.” Come down low, down to earth: “Writing is hard for every last one of us…Coal mining is harder. Do you think miners stand around all day talking about how hard it is to mine for coal? They do not. They simply dig…So simply write, Elissa Bassist. Not like a girl. Not like a boy. Write like a motherfucker.” (Bassist eventually published her first book, an acclaimed memoir, in 2022. On the back cover, there’s a blurb from Strayed: “…an impressive debut. Elissa Bassist wrote it like a motherfucker.”)
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