Upon randomly coming up with this title, I knew I had to have this as a blog post. But what is this post about?
My thoughts on why it’s hard to read and write, and easier to get distracted with video games or the phone.
When reading a book, you have to concentrate. You have to be able to see, hear, smell, taste, and feel everything this novel wants you to experience. It takes time, effort, and is harder to put down than to pick up. Writing takes even more effort than that, as you have to translate everything in your head onto the paper.
When playing a phone game you get a fun little experience, but it doesn’t envelope you. It provides the sights, sounds, and actions for you. It limits your imagination to just what it is presenting. It’s the same with movies. That’s why it’s so much easier to sit down for a moment and get distracted by an hour of a TV, and not an hour of that book lying on the shelf.
Books are quiet, they are like the wise old men with the prophecies in the fantasy novels. They aren’t the soothsayers, having their ringed hands, brandishing their crystal balls, shouting that for a coin that they can tell you everything you need to know about life. They are the old man in the white clothes, quiet, ready to impart wisdom and a great adventure to those who are willing to listen.
You are literally mind travelling to other dimensions and morphing into a different human skin suit whenever you read or write. Interplanetary travel was never depicted as easy, was it? No. I didn’t think so. Exactly.
And when writing, you’re not only scribing what you see in the world around you, but you’re figuring out how to manipulate it, change it, and make it work so others can believe it!
Time travelling takes a lot of time and energy, if you’ve ever watched a movie or read a book with a time machine you know that.
But maybe that’s what’s so special about books. The fact that they are quiet, but hold so, so many secrets. They only open up to those who listen, and are patient keepers of entire worlds in their pages.
And maybe that’s what so special about books. They are us. They are everything.
And we just have to take the time to find that.
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