“I read so I can live more than one life in more than one place.”
~ Anne Tyler
Who owns the time to experience everything in life one needs to reach the highest levels of awareness and acceptance to discover happiness? Also, the experiences we endure are singularly limited due to nature, time, and laws and ultimately, although extremely beneficial, life experience does not culminate in an efficient manner to gain awareness and acceptance.
So how can we acquire life experiences we can never have because of our natures, lack of time, and the fact they might lead us to imprisonment? It is actually an easy and common answer: READING.
The reason two year olds throw tantrums is not because they are immature or too young to understand what they want, because many adults I know throw similar tantrums when life does not transpire the way they desire it to as well. These tantrums stem from a two year old’s lack of vocabulary, the lack of the ability to express his/her emotions with the proper, specific words. Enter Reading: Reading builds our vocabularies so we will not become frustrated when trying to help someone understand our feelings, or more importantly, help us understand our feelings.
Reading breeds thinking. With the vocabulary we acquire from reading, we can now practice higher level thinking, thinking about everything from what to say in a stressful situation to how to approach the cashier to coax him into the backroom to retrieve the item not on the shelf but you know is stored on a shelf in the back of the store. I know if you are alive, you think, but how many times have you uttered the phrases, "I just can't explain it," "I don't know how to tell you what I mean," "I know how I'm feeling, but I just can't find the words to make it make sense," or any such variety?
Thinking breeds writing, but maybe not with a pen or pencil or other writing tool (although physical writing is worth its weight in gold), but with our minds, because now we have the ability to organize our thoughts into viable, tangible efforts of our labors. We can study our thoughts (or physical writing), rethink, and form logical conclusions about the thoughts preceding our efforts.
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