The importance of slowing down

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March 3, 2015 – I haven’t picked up my camera in over a month, haven’t written about a photo in a month, that’s a strange feeling. Life is so busy, and it’s so easy to let ourselves be too busy. The internet makes information so easily accessible that we ingest more and more, but digest less and less.

I think that’s what makes real books so valuable, particularly novels. I have to remind myself of this, because I’ve been terrible at reading them in recent years.

Reading for pleasure takes a backseat to reading for other purposes. I read scientific papers, I read book sections that are related to things I am working on, I read policy and regulatory documents, I read standard operating procedures. Most of my days are taken up with reading.

Our daily lives are so heavily laced with reading emails and skimming news stories to try to keep up on everything. But does that make our brains more efficient?

I don’t think so.

I think all that skimming of all of those feeds makes us less capable of really digesting what we read. We scan things and our attention spans have become shortened as a result.

Life has become hectic and reading a novel feels like a luxury. To sit still and read fiction seems….extravagant. So we tend to collect those works of fiction and store them away for weekends and vacations, times that we can binge read.

Reading is another form of travel, and when we travel we meet new people, discover new cultures, see new worlds. Through these journeys we become richer, we gain new knowledge, glean insights on how others interact with their world; we discover new ideas and we become more knowledgeable, more empathetic. Books teach us important things about ourselves. They teach us about values and conflict. Books teach us about race and about disabilities. A good novel makes us reflective and introspective; it can broaden the imagination and our sensitivity towards others. Fiction expands our horizons, it manifests both beauty and ugliness. Books teach us about our humanity, we become better humans when we read.

In this crazy age of self-improvement, maybe switching off the ‘way-to-a-better-you’ apps, turning away from the self-help websites, rejecting the ‘I-can-help-you-help-yourself’ peddlers, ……. and reading more fiction would do more good.

When I was out walking in downtown Vancouver at lunch the other day, I was looking up at all of the fantastic architecture, at the sunlight glittering off of the tens of thousands of windows that make up this City of Glass, as Douglas Coupland called it. And all around me were people rushing past, with their necks bent, their heads tilted, not upwards, but down into their phones.

We have become so needy for gratification; we want to feel good and we want to feel good right now! Maybe that’s why people aren’t reading fiction as much as they used to. Maybe the delayed gratification that is inherent in reading a book is something we are losing our ability to cope with.

It seems to have become rare to do anything at a leisurely pace, and a good novel commands leisurely attention.

When I was young I read fiction voraciously, often having three or more novels on the go at any one time. Reading opened my imagination to other places, other people, and different ideas.

Reading a novel isn’t a waste of time, it expands the mind and opens us to different perspectives.

How could that ever be a bad thing?

(116 Photos in 2016 – 22. World Book Day)