All the Books I'll Never Read
My imperfect attempt to craft a simple life as a multi-passionate creative.
Welcome to Slow Folk - a community for gentle hearts and rebellious creatives, thirsty for a slower life in a world obsessed with speed.
These are my notes and reflections from over a decade of life in the Slow Lane. If you’re ready to push back against busy to build a life of purpose and presence-over-perfection - please join me.
Welcome to the unbusy revolution.
I have a comfort stack. Have had one for as long as I can remember.
(Except perhaps the time I crammed a full English minor into four semesters. Then it was a chore-stack. No comfort there.)
Other than that - my bedside table has been perpetually graced with a teetering pile of books. Ever shifting, like dunes.
If it dwindles to less than a handful I get antsy, feel unmoored.
At the moment my comfort stack of books includes :
The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
The Communist Manifesto - Marx + Engels
Ninth Street Women : Five Painters and the Movement that Changed Modern Art - Mary Gabriel
The Red and the Black - Stendhal
Walden and Civil Disobedience - Thoreau
The Light That Failed : A Reckoning - Krastev + Holmes
The Road to Unfreedom - Snyder
The World-Ending Fire - Berry
A Short History of Progress - Wright
Necessary Illusions - Chomsky
Doom - Ferguson
As I held myself back (for now) from adding a stack of Steinbeck to the mix, it struck me how this single shelf is a microcosm of the wider experience of a so-called ‘multi-passionate’ creative struggling against her magpie nature to craft a simpler, slower life.
On one hand I want live a great, big, juicy life. To do, feel, be, read, experience, make, learn, create - all. the. things.
I want to go out into the world and snatch every shiny speck up in my beak, greedily, joyfully.
On the other . . . I know in my deepest reaches of my belly, where all my wisdom lies - more is not more.
And so here we are. The intersection of less and more - and secreted off there over the horizon in the deep, cool grass - better.
How do we, as creatives craving slowness, reconcile these two truths?
The truth of our nature - one of curiosity and gratitude for the breadth, depth and sheer abundance of experience . . . With the truth of our innermost craving?
Our longing for a wholehearted life of peace and presence and purpose?
How do we come to terms with the knowing - that the well from which these books spring will never run dry?
That there will always be - just one more?
How do I face, not my comfort stack, but all the books I’ll never read?
Paradoxically, for me, anyway - less but better - has been the only way.
I have opted to trade a busy life for a full one.
It means letting go of twitter and ticktok and instagram and facebook in favour of Steinbeck and Orwell and Toni Morrison and Mary Oliver and Dionne Brand.
It has meant trading inbox-zero for daily outdoor swims at dawn.
It has meant abandoning a ‘successful’ career for present and imperfect mothering and slow entrepreneurship.
What if, the key to facing the fear of missing out on all the beauty, joy and sheer exhilaration of existence that life has to offer, is to embrace the JOY of missing out?
What if making space for all the things, places, people, creativity, experience that we crave, that bubbles up inside us, demanding to be expressed - what if it means we finally have to start doing the opposite of our nature - to say NO?
So many fellow creatives and multi-passionate people I meet get prickly when we talk about setting limits. You can virtually see the quills rise.
Nobody puts baby in a corner, right?
But what if saying NO is the key to creating the slow, rich, present and purposeful life we crave?
‘Cause the thing is - What if all those things we want to do aren’t created equal?
Is spending time on twitter or learning how to do Threads ( ugh. ) REALLY as important, essential, life affirming and enriching as - I duno - writing that book that’s been on your heart since I don’t know when?
By insisting that everything we could or ‘should’ do has the same weight or importance - what we are really doing is declaring to the universe that NONE of it is important.
In our culture we’ve been conditioned to determine that if some task, tool, action or experience has SOME utility (no matter how small) then it must be valuable and should be allowed a slice of our ever-shrinking attention.
We do not ask - What does this cost me? What is the price? What do I have to give up in order to make room for this?
We don’t even acknowledge that there IS a price.
And so we pile on more more more - good, bad and ugly - without discernment or qualification . . . and we wonder why we are burnt out, overwhelmed, spread thin and just generally miserable and dissatisfied with both ourselves and our lives.
And so, I have decided find peace as a multi-passionate creative in this overflowing, overwhelming world - by learning to cultivate joy and gratitude for all the books I’ll never read.
To know that they are out there, like stars in the sky, countless constellations of beauty and ideas, shining brightly at a distance, even if I can’t see them.
To celebrate the fact that regardless of whether or not I get to drink them all in, I am still blessed by having lived in a world that contains Maya Angelou, Rushdie, Tolstoy, James Joyce, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Virginia Woolf, Vandana Shiva, Camus and Rumi and on and on and on. Bright minds whose light will shine on, even after their pens have stilled.
What a gift. To simply KNOW that that kind of creativity, that brightness of being - is possible.
We cannot approach even a twinkle of that brightness as creatives if we are spread too thin.
If we allow the non-essential, the unnecessary, the noise to overwhelm the essential, the clarity, the focus of the important work we are called to do doing this one fragile and fleeting life.
Perhaps saying NO to some of the things that tug on our attention won’t make us less as we fear.
Perhaps deliberate, compassionate and mindful editing is just what our work - and our lives - need.
Stacey Langford is a writer, renegade farmer and slow business mentor living and working in Canada’s Fraser Valley. In 2010 Stacey ditched her cubicle in the city to turn her attention homeward, farm and help others craft a simple life, from scratch.
As someone who is always surrounded by stacks of books - read and "to read" - this is such an interesting perspective! Thanks so much for sharing this, Stacey. 📚