WHOA, THAT’S DEEP!

Dr. Kelly Flanagan

When we moved from the suburbs back to my rural hometown, I thought we’d be trading the cacophony of Chicagoland for the quiet of the country. And, in a way, we did. The thing is, the countryside wasn’t as quiet as I thought it would be. In a really good way…

On a spring morning, the birds twitter and tweet and make a concert of their morning song. On a summer evening, the cicadas crescendo in the crowded trees, until, in the small hours of the night, they finally quiet, and the crickets take over, with their constant hum. On an autumn afternoon, dry leaves rustle in the treetops, and they skitter raspy along two-lane roads. In the winter, a snowfall can lay undisturbed for hours, and the muffled world fills your ears with the tinny ringing of your own blood rushing.

Underneath the loud and frenetic world we’ve created is a world that’s been created for us, and it moves to a deeper, slower rhythm.

I was recently asked, in an interview about Loveable, how do we start the journey toward wholeness? My answer was…space. Space to rest, to notice and to feel, to contemplate and to question. Space to move deeper into the wholeness that already exists, forgotten and neglected, somewhere within the depths of us.

Depth.

As we live increasingly on-line, where depth is quickly going extinct, it can look like the desire for depth is dying, too. For instance, the comments section of a blog was once the place you went for meaningful conversation; now, it’s the place you go to troll people. Not so long ago, social media was where you shared content that stirred your thinking and your heart. Now, generally, social media is where you stir up controversy and conflict.

But the publishing of Loveable renewed my hope.

The desire for depth has not died and it has not even gone dormant. We simply don’t go to social media for it anymore.

Instead, for instance, we faithfully return to the pages of a book, where an author has spent years diving deep into a singular topic. And there’s a reason podcasting has exploded as a new medium: podcasts are long-form. Podcasts go deep.

In social media, we browse about; in books and podcasts, we burrow down. In social media, we value volume and variety; in books and podcasts, we value veracity. In social media, we seek immediate satisfaction; in books and podcasts we seek delayed gratification. In social media, we want all the bells and whistles; in books and podcasts, we want to hear the subtler music of truth and beauty.

In other words, some of us are slowly realizing we want to move back to a countryside of discussion and depth.

We want a place we can encounter not the false self that we have created out of fear, but the true self that was created for us out of Love. A place where we can have not the good life that everyone is chasing, but the beautiful life that is already available to us, right here, right now, if only we can slow down long enough to listen for it, to see it, to touch it, to taste it.

So, here’s the thing: contemporary wisdom says that, with a book recently published, I should be blogging more. I should be increasing the amount of my content, getting into your inbox more frequently, and giving you more chances to click through and buy the book.

But the wisdom of the ages says volume isn’t king; depth is.

So, I’m going to listen to that wisdom, and instead of increasing the amount of my content, I’m going to increase the depth of it.

How am I going to do that?

I’m going to reduce the frequency of my weekly blog posts to every other week. Same time. Same place. But I’m cutting the content in half. Then, we’re going to go deeper on one topic in particular: you, your life, your story—your worthiness, your belonging, and your purpose.

We’re going to deepen the conversation here, and we’re going to do it with a podcast—a podcast you participate in.

It is called The Loveable Podcast and in it we will be walking with each other once a week for one year through the companion book to Loveable entitled, The Year of Listening, Loving, and Living. How will we walk together? On Wednesdays at 9am CT—beginning September 27—we will gather on Facebook Live. I’ll read one chapter from the book, including an inspirational reading and a practice for the week, and we will dig into them together. We’re going to stop scrolling and we’re going to start discussing. The audio from that Live session will then be folded into a podcast episode and made available the following week.

Discussion equals depth.

I can’t wait to go deeper with you.

Let’s resist the temptation to look at more and more stuff in the digital world, and let’s look more and more closely at our life in the real world. The world where birds chirp and cicadas hum and leaves rasp and hearts beat. Let’s insist on depth. Indeed, let’s insist on moving deeper, into the bright abyss underneath all of our pain and mess and shame.

Let’s move deeper into your truest, worthiest, most loveable self.

P.S. Speaking of discussions, if you have any questions about the podcast, you can click here to view a recent Facebook Live discussion about the podcast itself. I think it will answer most of your questions.