“This is temporal contentment: to inhabit time with eyes wide open, hands outstretched, not to grasp but to receive, enjoy, and let go.” —James K.A. Smith, How to Inhabit Time
I pick up my phone to write a quick caption for a photo of the morning sun rising up above my backyard, but the words won’t come. They exist, swirling inside me like a torrent, but I grow overwhelmed by ideas and concepts that do not seem to fit into a single square or five-hundred-word post.
Nuance is not neatly packaged. And as a person who identifies as an Enneagram 4 and writes on the connectedness between God and man, I see swirls of gray and complexity more than I do clean and crisp lines. I do not easily condense. Add into that equation a God who is infinitely beyond our understanding, and I am left looking at my phone and wondering, “How can a few hundred words even begin to do that justice?”
It can’t. It won’t. But does that mean we do not try?
In May, I turned in the first draft of my manuscript. Apart from my editor and her team, the 50,000+ words remain unseen (the book won’t hit shelves until sometime mid-2024). But one thing I discovered in the middle of writing was how much I loved the long form. I had never written an entire book before, but as I allowed one sentence to build into one paragraph and then grow into a chapter that eventually expanded into a book, I found an internal settledness I had not experienced before as a writer. No longer was I trying to distill a larger conversation to make it more digestible, but rather, given room to explore. It was freeing.
As a writer, I think I prefer the long form. And I wonder if, as humans, our souls prefer we live that way too.
When I was nineteen years old, the internal pressure of choosing a major was nearly crushing. I felt as if I were choosing a face I would have to live with the rest of my adult life. I changed my course of study once (if not twice) before I even moved onto the campus of my small Midwestern Christian liberal arts college. There was this sense that I needed to be able to know myself and hold my future in the palm of my hand. I needed to declare a major much like Michael Scott declared bankruptcy.
But no amount of shouting would change the fact that that my sense of self felt slippery and the future foggy at best.
These days, as I settle into saggier and stretchier 40-year-old skin, I am more content with the haze, with the reality that looking back will always feel a little clearer than what’s ahead and who I am is not the end of who I will be.
Like writing, life builds. Each moment holds hands with the countless hours that have come before as well as the seconds to follow. A single moment does not have to contain all that has been, is, or is yet to be, because there is freedom in the long form. In the words of David Brenner, we can look at ourselves past, present, and future and “receive it with hospitality, not hostility,” knowing that one moment, one word, one mistake, one opinion does not summarize the fullness of our humanity.
There is grace in the long form.
There is room for not knowing in the long form.
There is space to let our questions linger because we know the story is not over.
There is always another sentence, another paragraph, another chapter, weaving together all that has been into all that is yet to be.
I totally agree. I hadn’t thought of it this way, but yes, I too prefer the long form. I say all the time, I’d rather write a book proposal than a greeting card. Life in the long form - something to be mindful of. Thank you
Sarah! Congrats on handing in your manuscript. What an incredible and beautiful achievement! I agree about long form writing. As I’ve been more diligent about journaling, I find my thoughts and ideas take random turns. I need pages and pages to let it all unfold. And when I write substack essays it’s often the same. A manuscript sounds a bit intimidating, but also there’s so much to be said for ample space to more deeply explore deep questions and the myriad through-lines of our lives.