We keep saying our attention is fractured. Reading is what helps me scotch-tape it back together.
Sure it's a cliché that books can change our lives. But, the act of reading, and what I'm reading, has profoundly changed mine.
Last summer, I wrote about how I was dedicating myself to re-finding something to love about writing. More recently, I’ve mentioned writing that made a big difference in how I think about my life and time (personally and professionally). In January, I’ve reckoned with why I don’t have a strategic planning habit for myself and why writing has helped me realize that I should. And now, I’m mid-application to a writing residency, and the application asked me to detail my relationship to writing and reading.
All of this is converging on a topic I bumped into on one of my favorite corners of the internet a couple of weeks ago: “what is self-help? isn’t everything self-help?” The writer pulled those ideas together with a prompt: “discuss a book that has helped you figure out how to be.”
These various thread have nudged me to affirm that reading itself is a fundamental part of my experience of writing. Reading for pleasure, reading beyond my disciplin…