Am I a victim of the social media curse? You know the one. You can’t focus attention for more than a handful of seconds before swiping to something new. The quick answer would be yes, but that’s a cop out. The truth is, I’ve never been a disciplined reader.
Ever since I was a child my mind would wander, my eyes glaze over, and it would take me months (often longer) to finish a book. That is, if I ever actually finished. While I’ve always known this about myself, it became embarrassingly clear recently as I planned a vacation.
I’m spending a week in Cape May, NJ. It’s meant to be a relaxing week, free from any stress or anxiety about what I should be doing. The plan is to read, write, and soak in the local charm. As I was preparing, I realized I had bought a book down here last summer (‘Dandelion Wine’ by Ray Bradbury) that I had yet to finish. A year! It’s a good read, so why have I been sleeping on this book for so long?
I need discipline. That seems easy enough but first, I need to identify the problem. This reading revelation identified a bigger issue. As I look back on my life, I can see when things would go off the rails. Some personal or professional trauma would trigger a reaction that caused a sudden, unhealthy shift in behavior. A refocusing of my energy from positive to negative. I’d wallow rather than prosper.
It’s a behavior that along the way sabotaged my music, my relationships, my life savings, my career, my health, my reading, and my writing. I’d irrationally drop out of one aspect of life, blindly leap into another, drop out again, leap again — rinse, repeat. Anytime anything would go wrong — or seem to go wrong. I often didn’t even give things a chance to play out before I’d burn it all down and walk away.
In an ironic twist, I was trying to stop that cycle by walking away from my life in the food business in 2023. For twelve years I obsessed over making it work. I buried myself, lost myself. I stopped nearly every other aspect of my life. And it was killing me. So, I walked away, but this time it was not irrational. It was purposeful, and for the last two years or so, I’ve been striving to rediscover meaning in my life.
What does this have to do with reading? Quite a lot, actually. Much of what I had lost along the way was a sense of completion. A sense of purpose. I’d get caught up in the minutia of failure, I’d forget that there’s a lot to be said about little, incremental successes. Finishing a task, no matter how trivial it may seem, such as reading a book. That feeling of, ‘I did it,’ goes a long way in the mind of someone so shackled by reminiscence and regret.
Now, as I continue on this journey of starting over and revisiting things lost, I look back on all the books I’ve bought but never read as symbolic. It represents all the goals that I let fall victim to my anxiety and depression. There are now opportunities to reclaim some of them as successes. So, I’ll compile a new (old) reading list, a new listening list, a new to do list, and give it my best shot.
What’s something you’ve discovered about yourself that inspired a new beginning? Something you let go of but are now trying to give new life? Have you taken the steps to achieve a goal? Are you planning to? Let me know. For me, reading was just an extra bright reminder of things I let go (and an easy one to fix). It’s certainly not the only thing that I want to revisit, rekindle.
Cheers!
Stephen
