💬 How do you balance faith and doubt?

Our monthly(ish) community prompt

“Time is short, my strength is limited, the office is a horror, the apartment is noisy, and if a pleasant, straightforward life is not possible, then one must try to wriggle through by subtle maneuvers.”

—Franz Kafka’s 1912 letter to his fiancée in Letters to Felice (via Daily Rituals by

Mason Currey

)

“You’re organizing a literary dinner party. Which three writers, dead or alive, do you invite?” This is the final question of the written “By the Book” interview with a contemporary author for the Sunday New York Times Book Review.¹

The answers are always impossibly erudite—no doubt some cognoscenti showboating sneaks in, conveying just how sophisticated the featured author is. Still, a few editions ago, I encountered an answer from Adam Haslett, author of Mothers and Sons, that landed with a ping of instant recognition. (Bold emphasis mine; I hope you get a chuckle out of the intellectual flexing, too 😆):

You’re organizing a literary dinner party. Which three writers, dead or alive, do you invite?
Haslett: “According to Ray Monk’s brilliant biography of Ludwig Wittgenstein, Wittgenstein may have met Virginia Woolf at one of John Maynard Keynes’s parties, but ‘neither seems to have made much impression on the other.’ (Wittgenstein was often stiff or rude around women.) Rather than organize another party, I’d like to have been seated between them at that one. I somehow imagine myself easing Wittgenstein’s rigidity and drawing the two of them into a conversation about the pleasures of language and the balance between faith and doubt in a writer or thinker’s life.”

THAT! I thought as the line snapped into focus. That is the tension we’re exploring here at Doh, the balance between faith and doubt. Not eliminating doubt or pretending it doesn’t exist, nor leaning solely on faith in a mist of magical thinking.

The balance—the ever-elusive balance (and perpetual failure to achieve it)—contains the Bittersweet quality

Susan Cain

dedicated an entire book to, exploring how we “transform pain into creativity, transcendence, and love.”

This tension, this creative friction, is the terroir of transformation.

At the risk of you thinking I’m more curmudgeonly and melancholic than I am (or, who knows, I might be that neurotic but just hide it better IRL): I don’t emphasize shiny stories here on purpose. (“I was down to my last two dollars this one time at the ATM, and now I am a kazillionaire and you can be too—yes, you.”) There are enough of those.

I started Doh because I was craving what was missing: real talk about the nitty-gritty sides of self-employment. That means fessing up to the mess.

Building on our earlier monthly(ish) Community Doh discussion threads, I’d love to hear from you in the comments.²

💬 How do you navigate the tension between faith and doubt inherent in a creative career?

What gifts do your doubts, insecurities, and anxieties bring?³ That is, if you’re not enlightened yet, either. 😆

Bonus: Which three literary figures would you invite to dinner? Extra points if your list is embarrassing and/or more than a thinly veiled device to impress the culturati :)

Note: These are for paid subscribers only, so fellow Dohnuts can feel more secure in sharing, knowing the stories and comments aren’t publicly searchable. I would love for you to join us!

❤️

P.S. Because I’m a maximalist and can’t resist, I’ll leave you with a favorite related take on hope vs. faith from Robert Louis Stevenson, author of Treasure Island, in an 1877 essay on marriage:

“To avoid an occasion for our virtues is a worse degree of failure than to push forward pluckily and make a fall.

. . . The true conclusion of this paper is to turn our back on apprehensions, and embrace that shining and courageous virtue, Faith. Hope is the boy, a blind, headlong, pleasant fellow; Faith is the grave, experienced, yet smiling man. Hope lives on ignorance; open-eyed Faith is built upon a knowledge of our life....In the one temper, a man...expects an angel for a wife; in the last, he knows that she is like himself—erring, thoughtless, and untrue; but like himself also, filled with a struggling radiancy of better things...

You may safely go to school with hope; but ere you marry, should have learned the mingled lesson of the world: that dolls are stuffed with sawdust, and yet are excellent playthings; that hope and love address themselves to a perfection never realized, and yet, firmly held, become the salt and staff of life.”

—Robert Louis Stevenson

1. 📚 Browse the By the Book interviews online; the NYT also published a compilation book a decade ago that a dear friend generously gifted to me, By the Book: Writers on Literature and the Literary Life. For a related meta-read, check out The New York Times Book Review: 125 Years of Literary History (published in 2021).

🫖 I love Vanity Fair’s back-of-the-magazine Proust Questionnaire even more, although I rarely catch them these days. I ended my subscription shortly after the legendary Graydon Carter stepped down, pivoting into a paid newsletter, Air Mail).

2. 🍩 View earlier discussion prompts—and weigh in any time, it’s never too late!—here:

3. 🎙 This is the central question I explored for nine years on the Pivot podcast. Peruse the archives here and/or listen in your favorite podcast app.

For nearly 300 episodes geared toward creatives and small business owners, check out the Free Time archives here, and subscribe wherever you listen here.

I’m also grateful to

Rochelle Moulton

and

amelia hruby

for having me on their respective shows, The Soloist Life and Off the Grid, to talk about the messy, mid-process Rolling in Doh journey in all its wound-not-scar unfolding. Get the links to listen here: