I write to learn. If someone else reads it and learns, too, that's a bonus.
As a child, my favorite book was THE LITTLE RED HEN ("I'll do it myself" is what I carried with me from it), and, according to my mother, I never tired of hearing her read it to me. I can picture myself, book in hand, asking her to read, wanting us to sit in the rocker where she almost always read to me, to hear that creaking wood soothe me with its familiar sounds and rhythms, to feel the warmth of my mother's lap, her accepting and cocooning self keeping me safe in the moment, rocking.
A new friend of mine recently told me that she's not writing so much anymore, not reading so much, but is living more, attending to her spirit more.
Her saying this caused me to consider how often I've believed that if only I can learn just a little more about whatever it is that's currently obsessing me, to read just one more book, then I'll be okay (and what does "okay" mean?). But what these books often do is put off the inevitable, the crucial, the necessity of my simply acting.
It's as if I think that I can figure out how to live my life by reading what others have done, and yes----it's interesting to do this and often helpful and inspiring, but knowing what others have done doesn't necessarily prompt me to act. In fact, reading about others' actions frequently keeps me from acting on my own; instead, I live vicariously.
I guess what I'm finally figuring out is this: Books and ideas aren't going to save me from these emotions that overwhelm me still on occasion. Nor can they make the decisions for me about how to live each day.
Now that may sound a little ridiculous, but at one point in my life I actually thought that If only I had more time to read. . ., kind of like those people who say to themselves, If only I had more money [or time or whatever]. Yet now that I have all the time in the world to read, I realize it's not enough. Reading is not enough to make me happy, though I admit that I love ideas, I love considering this life of ours through the prisms of different people's ideas, and reading remains a great pleasure for me.
