Sunday 3 March 2013

Week 9 Update: One page at a time.

This week has been such a treat - reading every day! Delicious.

For a while there I wondered if I'd lost my reading mojo. Now I realise I was unnecessarily giving myself a hard time - reading seemed a bit too luxurious and selfish when my time could be 'better' spent catching up on the washing while my son napped. What nonsense. Reading is an essential staple in my life - without it, I just don't feel like me.

During the week, as I disappeared between the pages, time seemed to stand still. It was just me and the words on the page. Except when it wasn't, of course ... You know those times when you get to the end of a page and think "huh, what did I just read?" Yeah, well, that happened too. I'd find myself thinking about something else (dinner, washing, plans for the new house ...) and, even though I kept on 'reading', nothing was getting through.

No surprises here, but it turns out that reading is far more enjoyable when you're mindful about it. In fact, it kinda just doesn't work if you're not. This 'light bulb' moment got me thinking: if reading becomes compromised when we're not mindful, imagine all the other things in our lives that suffer. All those conversations half contributed to; near-misses while we're driving; food eaten but not experienced. In short, the page/ our lives passing by in a blur.

Reading mindfully is a nice metaphor for living mindfully: taking it one word, one sentence, one paragraph, one page at a time.

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