To read widely is to live widely.
Don’t let social media influencers fool you. Reading offers the best way to live your best life. Hands Down. Leave a comment to join this dialogue, then keep scrolling to see today’s writing prompt.
Have you ever felt like you’ll never be able to do enough or see enough in this lifetime? That there will always be more places to visit, new people to meet and understand, new sites to see, different landscapes to traverse, different experiences to have, and different foods to taste? Well, I have. Especially in an age where influencers from all over the world are constantly vying for our attention, desperately trying to sell us lifestyles that aren’t meant for us. Lifestyles most of us don’t even really want, when we pause for a beat to self-reflect anyway.
But this is why we read, no? To experience most of what the world has to offer before we’re dead? To pack in as many human experiences as we can, while we can? To feel things we’ll never feel in our day-to-day lives, or over the course of our entire lifespans? To see what it’s like to step into someone else’s shoes? To explore more places and epochs than we could ever dream of exploring alone via our limited perspectives, capabilities, and lifetimes?
Essentially, we read to live as widely as we can, no?
Sure, we need to read to memorize information and learn, but reading widely (across genres and audiences and epochs), and reading for purposes besides storing facts to compute some other time, is its own sort of education and intentional lifestyle. Is it not?
There are so many reasons to read, but reading widely is one of the best ways to live your best life, as soon as possible. Because, even if you had all the money you needed to travel the world and do whatever you wanted to do right now, you’d still have a limited time in which to do those things before you leave this world, and traveling from one place to another can take more time than picking up the next book you want to read and immerse yourself in.
“I believe we’d all read more books, and enjoy reading a more diverse pool of books, if we questioned why we read, or better yet, if we questioned why we enjoy reading. What would happen if more of us celebrated and encouraged reading more books for reasons outside of traditional rote learning? Any book you read will teach you something. But are you open to everything that book can teach you?”
Why do you read books? - Daily Drafts & Dialogues
Today’s post is intended to encourage you to consider not only what you read but why you read, or why you want to read. It’s not intended to shame you or anyone else, but liberate us all from feeling like there’s only one way to read, and that there are only certain books worth reading— or worse, that the lifestyles social media influencers are trying to sell us are more tangible and enriching than what we could ever discover inside a diversity of books in our lifetimes.
Here are some tidbits of wisdom to consider as you reflect on your reading habits today:
“A reader lives a thousand lives before he dies. The man who never reads lives only one.” — George R.R. Martin
“Reading is everything. Reading makes me feel like I’ve accomplished something, learned something, become a better person. Reading makes me smarter. Reading gives me something to talk about later on. Reading is the unbelievably healthy way my attention deficit disorder medicates itself. Reading is escape, and the opposite of escape; it’s a way to make contact with reality after a day of making things up, and it’s a way of making contact with someone else’s imagination after a day that’s all too real. Reading is grist. Reading is bliss.” ― Nora Ephron
“In reading great literature I become a thousand men and yet remain myself.” — C.S. Lewis
“It is what you read when you don’t have to that determines what you will be when you can’t help it.” ― Oscar Wilde
“Only the very weak-minded refuse to be influenced by literature and poetry.”― Cassandra Clare
“It is not true that we have only one life to live; if we can read, we can live as many more lives and as many kinds of lives as we wish.” — S.I. Hayakawa
“The only way to do all the things you’d like to do is to read.” — Tom Clancy
“To read a story well is to follow it, to act it, to feel it, to become it—everything short of writing it, in fact.” — Ursula K. LeGuin
“I am a part of everything that I have read.” — Theodore Roosevelt
“Until I feared I would lose it, I never loved to read. One does not love breathing.” ― Harper Lee
“Books are a uniquely portable magic.”― Stephen King
“The more that you read, the more things you will know. The more that you learn, the more places you’ll go.” — Dr. Seuss
“If you only read the books that everyone else is reading, you can only think what everyone else is thinking.” — Haruki Murakami
“You don’t have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them.” ― Ray Bradbury
“What really knocks me out is a book that, when you’re all done reading it, you wish the author that wrote it was a terrific friend of yours and you could call him up on the phone whenever you felt like it. That doesn’t happen much, though.” ― J.D. Salinger
“Reading is a conversation. All books talk. But a good book listens as well.”—Mark Haddon
“No book is really worth reading at the age of ten which is not equally – and often far more – worth reading at the age of fifty and beyond.” ― C.S. Lewis
“In the end, we’ll all become stories.”— Margaret Atwood
“Let us remember: One book, one pen, one child, and one teacher can change the world.”—Malala Yousafzai
“That’s the thing about books. They let you travel without moving your feet.”—Jhumpa Lahiri
“The ability to read awoke inside me some long dormant craving to be mentally alive.”—Malcolm X
“Books are the plane, and the train, and the road. They are the destination, and the journey. They are home.”—Anna Quindlen
“We read books to find out who we are. What other people, real or imaginary, do and think and feel... is an essential guide to our understanding of what we ourselves are and may become.”—Ursula K. LeGuin
“One glance at a book and you hear the voice of another person, perhaps someone dead for 1,000 years. To read is to voyage through time.”—Carl Sagan
What are your thoughts on this topic? Leave a comment to join this dialogue, and don’t forget to share this post with others so they can join this dialogue too.
© This work is not available for artificial intelligence (AI) training. All Rights Reserved by K.E. Creighton; Creighton’s Compositions LLC.
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Today’s Writing Prompt
Writing Prompt: My Kryptonite
Write a poem or journal entry about your kryptonite, that one thing (or person) that always seems to weaken your resolve.
Writing Tip:
This writing exercise is reflective and introspective, which might prove emotionally challenging as a result. However, reflecting on your strengths before reflecting on your weaknesses could give you the resolve and perspective you need to complete this exercise honestly, yet with the right amount of self-compassion.
