Tag: reading

Reading Right

I didn’t write this piece on reading. But I could have.

Why do I read?

I just can’t help myself.

I read to learn and to grow, to laugh

and to be motivated.

I read to understand things I’ve never

been exposed to.

I read when I’m crabby, when I’ve just

said monumentally dumb things to the

people I love.

I read for strength to help me when I

feel broken, discouraged, and afraid.

I read when I’m angry at the whole

world.

I read when everything is going right.

I read to find hope.

I read because I’m made up not just of

skin and bones, of sights, feelings,

and a deep need for chocolate, but I’m

also made up of words.

Words describe my thoughts and what’s

hidden in my heart.

Words are alive–when I’ve found a

story that I love, I read it again and

again, like playing a favorite song

over and over.

Reading isn’t passive–I enter the

story with the characters, breathe

their air, feel their frustrations,

scream at them to stop when they’re

about to do something stupid, cry with

them, laugh with them.

Reading for me, is spending time with a

friend.

A book is a friend.

You can never have too many.

Gary Paulsen

(Book: Shelf Life: Stories by the Book [ad] https://amzn.to/3uLtUAC)

Overextended

A happy life, I’ve learned, is all about balance.

A happy life usually has equal parts of joy and stress and in manageable measures.

There will always be challenges in the tasks of daily life.

We take care of ourselves. We create and check items off our “to-do” list. We pay our bills. Send congratulatory birthday messages. Take the garbage out. Eat.

But then there are those other times. The times when stress is greater than joy. When the tasks that need to be done match the complexity of Santa’s gift list. (How DOES he do it?)

Lately, I find myself in Santa’s shoes – metaphorically.

I’m setting up house and the process seems to have gone on ad infinitum. That is an exaggeration but you may relate to the feeling.

When the budget report is due at work. The term paper is due tomorrow. The school bake sale is on the weekend and you haven’t even picked up baking supplies yet.

The end of the month means all the bills have to be paid on time or face penalties and interest charges if they aren’t. Is there enough in the account to cover everything?

It is cyclical. I think that is god’s trick to keep us all moving forward. I mean, if everything were taken care of for us and we had nothing to do or plan for, what could we possibly do with all of our free time?

Part of being busy for me is personality and character based. I love being busy. It is something of a creative exercise for me to plot and plan and devise what new projects I can take on.

Whether those projects are focussed on my hubby or in the kitchen, the garden, the house, or the world at large, I am always happier when I have tasks to accomplish.

And happier still, when I have the means to accomplish those tasks. That means the health and energy to tackle them. The money to acquire the necessary components for the task(s).

If I’m honest, overextended for me is a way of being. I say I don’t like it when stress is out of control and I am wildly out of balance between happy time and fretting. But who created this imbalance, I am compelled to ask?

Er, me? Okay. Yes. Guilty as charged. It may be that overextension has become a habit of mine. I raised two children as a single parent. Those were days of fairly nonstop overwhelm.

Speaking personally, no one advises you exactly how much time, attention and hard labor (well beyond the initial birth pushing to get them here) that babies and children require.

That is likely an unspoken agreement on the part of humanity to ensure the population keeps replenishing itself. Because if everyone knew at the outset exactly what the whole child-rearing/parenting gambit was going to entail, it might discourage people from having them.

In this current slice of overwhelm I am living through, I am quietly seeking solutions. Prioritize to start. What has to be done? (And what are the consequences if it isn’t?) What do I want to do? (And why? Personal satisfaction or to please someone I love?)

Or, frankly, the third block on my priority list is that it doesn’t matter. If I ever get around to doing this thing, it likely won’t matter but I’ve always wanted to try it and wouldn’t it be neat if I could? (Rock tumbling and polishing comes to mind. Don’t ask. A childhood hangover.)

So time to make a new priority list. Time to carve up those tasks according to my little chart of need/want/maybe. Time to engage the help of others (when and as possible). Time to give myself a break.

And while I’m at it, I’m going to give myself a hand and an “attagirl” for what months of attacking “to-do” lists has already helped me achieve. I don’t normally promote looking backwards as it usually accomplishes little to ruminate about the past.

But occasionally, when you need to take a breath and a breather to reorient yourself to what you need to do, it is good to remind yourself of what you have accomplished.

Likely at a time when you were in a place very much like the place of overwhelm you are trying to dig yourself out of today. Remind yourself of what’s been done to date and how far you’ve come.

Sip and savor that cappuccino. Read a little from a best-selling new novel between tasks. Sit in the sun and appreciate the garden you planted that wasn’t there before you came along.

It’s an important strategy boost to reenergize yourself for the tasks ahead.

I believe it is called balance.

Disconnecting to Connect

It is mighty hard to escape the internet. For me anyway. I am a bona fide, non-apologetic, drank-the-Kool-Aid “interweb” junkie.

So when I am forced to forgo internet access, I get spleeny. Like someone has taken away my favorite toy.

I find compensation since I have to. Without electronic entertainment, I have to devise my own. Without the illusion of connection to “everywhere, everything, all at once,” some familiar old friends come into play.

Imagination for example. I sit in my living room devising scenarios about how to alter it, improve it, change it more to my liking, or, most aptly put, make it more like me and my taste.

Much as I experience when sitting down to write this daily blog, disconnection from external stimulants allows me the luxury of enjoying my own internal dictates. My own thoughts.

I love to read, for example. I am thrilled by the right books and happily transported to worlds other than my own, filled with characters facing challenges I never hope to encounter.

Reading deepens my compassion for the human condition without the messy and distracting emotional work involved in real-life people dramas. To that end, reading is also finite. People dramas – as we who are raised in less-than-ideal families know – can last indefinitely. Or they can repeat predictably and tiresomely for years.

In good books, the protagonists are forced to deal with whatever situation it is that they were flung into. What would be the point of the book otherwise? For those who well know the classic, if now formulaic, Hero’s Journey, there is an identifiable story throughline in these books.

The hero is born and separated by the fates from all that is familiar. S/he prepares for and meets challenges. S/he is close to being completely undone by the magnitude of the challenges but s/he perseveres. S/he emerges, in the end, changed and triumphant by the growth experiences s/he has had.

So the current challenge this “hero” (i.e. me, if we rightfully assume we are the heroes of our own journeys), is battling a dead internet. Fortunately, like other heroes, I am forced to draw upon previously untapped internal resources to rise to the occasion and surmount the problem.

I have prepared this blog in MS Word. I will soon head out looking for alternate internet sources: the library, Starbucks, or most reliably, McDonald’s. All the while riding the telephone and Xfinity gods for a quick and speedy resolution to this grievous inconvenience.

Which, if I’m honest, isn’t all that inconvenient. I am rather enjoying the disconnection and downtime away from the incessant demands of the internet, email, and plowing through unwanted sales pitches.

Maybe I won’t dog those nice people at Xfinity too fiercely, after all. Maybe this temporary disconnection is a blessing in disguise. Heading over to my reading chair to see what might suit me to fill in the deliciously disconnected mental space.   

Make Our Garden Grow

I love Easter’s message about the certainty of renewal and resurrection for all of us. I love it not so much as a religious message but as a spiritual rule of life. Resurrection and renewal underscore the phases of our lives. There are repetitive patterns of death and renewal throughout. To move forward in life usually means we must leave something behind. Nothing lasts forever. Neither good times nor bad. Leaving things behind is what we need to do in order to grow. Graduation means the end of formal schooling and close connections to the pals you shared it with. Marriage, done right, is saying goodbye not only to singledom but self-centeredness. Birthing children means the end of a good night’s sleep for months on end. Okay, that shortchanges the enormity of how children affect us inside and out. When those babies eventually leave home to start their own lives a decade or so later, it can be a wrenching loss and upheaval for parents. But it can also be liberation. Time is finally available to allow us to return focus to our own interests. This pattern of death and rebirth occurs regularly in everyone’s lives. Time grants us the perspective to look back and accept the certainty of these patterns as the natural patterns of life. If we’re lucky, we get to say a gentle goodbye to every era of our life and welcome what is coming with open arms. Time presses on with or without us. Of course, it requires emotional balance and maturity to make those transitions seamlessly and successfully. Most of us traverse these fissures well enough, often accompanied by some measure of anxiety and trepidation. Most humans react predictably in the face of meeting the unknown. Farmers and gardeners are lucky to be more closely connected than most to these recurring patterns of birth, death, and rebirth. It puzzled me in my youth why gardeners – often older people – took such satisfaction from creating a garden. Looked like a lot of work for questionable results. Nowadays it makes more sense to me. A garden is a contained world we can create and tend through our own choices and efforts. We get to enjoy and share the joy from the beauty of flowers, the nourishment of fruits and vegetables, and a tract of grass that can be a carpet and a playground. A garden is also a guard against erosion – personal and spiritual. Cultivating a metaphorical garden inside ourselves that manifests in our outer life nourishes us and our loved ones. It is considered by some observers to be one of the fundamental ingredients for happiness. As the years press on, our sphere of control in the world outside gets smaller. But our inner world is eternally ours to manage. Reading books nurtures our inner garden. It takes us to places and worlds we may never visit in person and introduces us to all manner of exotica. Readers know this intimately. So do writers.

On Giving Up and Fading Away

The pull to give up is an all too frequent hazard on the writing path. As we get older, the drive to advocate for ourselves can diminish. Our wish to fight against injustice in our own personal world or the world at large or to tell our own story can fade. What does it matter anyway? Who am I to write a book? Let’s get crystal clear that the process of writing a book is deeply personal and generally isolated. In truth, isolation – whether we buy into this or not – is actually how we live our lives. And that is not necessarily a bad thing. It is realistic. “We’re born alone, we live alone, we die alone. Only through our love and friendship can we create the illusion for the moment that we’re not alone.” – Orson Welles. No matter how well someone knows you, they cannot know all of you. They cannot know who you were at that moment, what your options were, the constraints of your situation, or the limited choices you had. I often hear in response to stories of domestic violence: “I would never stand for that treatment. I would head out the door the moment someone raised a hand to me and never come back. Why didn’t you just walk away?” Always delivered with a look of disbelief and faint disgust, a wrinkled nose, and a raised eyebrow. Oh yeah? Only other survivors or sufferers of domestic violence can credibly relate. Rape survivors often get the same reaction and experience when disclosing their pain to others. Most women conclude disclosure isn’t worth the risk. You take risks whenever you share anecdotes about your life with other people – both the hilarious and the horrific. And by hilarious and horrific, I mean both the anecdotes and the people you share them with. You cleverly couch and cover up your experience by sharing insights you gained from your pain and your healing. You refer to the “ah-ha” moments that changed your life. Because while it is a nice and tidy platitude, no one else can ever really walk a mile in your moccasins. For example, you have been bombarded by advertisements against smoking all your life, but then witness a beloved relative – perhaps a parent – succumb to cancer. That brings it up close and personal. Everyone can relate to sadness and loss but no one can feel exactly about that particular incident what you felt. They could not have seen what you saw, heard, smelled, or thought at the time. So why not give up on this impossible task from the get-go or even bother to set off on this fool’s errand? Face it. What you have to say likely doesn’t mean anything in “the grand scheme of things.” So here’s why I won’t give up. Because I am the only me there is. Because books and the words within them saved my life. From an early age – about three years old – I learned to read and write. It made Grade One a boring cakewalk. As the adults around me were doing daily crazy, I crept up into my little “book nook” in the space above my bedroom closet wearing my thin cotton nightie. I had a stack of books beside me then just as I do today. Different books, mind you. The authors back then became my close-ish, personal friends. Back in the day, it was anything written by the Grimms Brothers with their dark implications about life’s dangers in their “fairy tales.” The wonders of the Childcraft encyclopedia took me everywhere and sowed the seeds for lifelong eclectic learning. Aesop’s Fables afforded me lessons in morality and cause and effect that I wasn’t getting from my parents at home. Crazy adults, remember? Mom made sure local author Desmond Pacey’s The Cow with the Musical Moo was always on display in the house where visitors – especially Professor Pacey himself – could clearly see it. At some point, “doing the best they could with what they knew at the time” doesn’t quite cut it. There is much they chose not to know. They have long been forgiven but the scars are immutable. Scars can certainly be softened over time but not erased. It’s similar to forgiving rapists who were – you know – just looking for love in the only way they knew how. “Boys will be boys after all,” they say. And the dumbfounded women they’ve terrorized sink inward and deeper until they are in danger of completely fading away. Until one day they are no longer there. Fuck that!