Born free

After talking with a close friend last night, I'm inspired to try to halve my week so as to be a louse for three days and then attempt to be a creative being during the other four days. I was sitting in my car this morning waiting for a traffic light to turn green when my long gaze at a Bob Evans sign across the street led my thoughts into what days will be Productive and what days will be Indulgent.

Productive: Sunday through Wednesday.
Indulgent: Thursday through Saturday.

Productive days shall contain any of the following: writing, reading, gyming, cooking, sleeping, and trying not to drink a shit ton.

Indulgent days shall contain most of the following: sleeping a lot more, watching many things on Netflix, eating less restrictively, writing, reading, and trying not to drink to the point of massive hangovers the following morning.

I make the same New Year's resolution every year and every year I feel like I fail to keep it: read more books. I never feel like I read enough, never have. My home is lined with books, I visit the library regularly, I've recently resumed purchasing books - and yet I feel like I barely read at all. I'm not sure what the watermark looks like against which I'll measure my reading and someday declare, "Oh hey - I'm reading as much as I should." I'm not even sure it's a tangible metric. I dare consider that the incessant urge to always read more be a good thing, as if it's the mark of a keen scholar, but something tells me that such an urge shouldn't also constantly make me feel like I'm failing.

I need to get my mind beyond the linear definition of learning. So far, I look at my life and consider much of the time I didn't spend reading to be a deficit that I must make up before I can actually begin to think that I'm reading as much as I should be. That's not a constructive way to think about it, as life itself isn't a linear trajectory (other than the natural straight line drawn between the biological imperative of birth and death). I need to become a more dynamic learner, someone who can think in more directions than forward or backward, or up and down. The thought process should be less a triangle and more a prism, refracting thoughts into multiple directions with various points of density.

Here's what I've been reading the past couple of weeks:


It's certainly not much.

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