Day 46: Something to Aspire To

From Garth Stein’s The Art of Racing in the Rain:

To live every day as if it had been stolen from death, that is how I would like to live. 

To feel the joy of life. 

To separate oneself from the burden, the angst, the anguish that we all encounter every day. 

To say I am alive, I am wonderful, I am. 

I am. 

That is something to aspire to.

If you haven’t read this book yet, please do. And do it now.

I fell out of the habit of reading for pleasure when I took a job that required me to scrutinize advertising copy and legal disclaimers for eight hours a day, five days a week.

Once I retired my red pen at 5:00 and rubbed my eyes clear of that day’s blur of misplaced apostrophes and their/they’re mishaps, the last thing I wanted to do was read. What a damn shame.

With the help of my Kindle and hours of free time on buses and planes, I’ve rediscovered my love of reading. I’ve enjoyed the Millenium trilogy, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy and, just this morning as I traveled from Brisbane to Noosa, The Art of Racing in the Rain.

I had forgotten what it feels like to become engrossed in a fictional work, to want the words to melt off the pages and seep directly into your body. There are books you read, and then there are books you consume.

I have endless admiration for those authors who can construct personalities, histories, interactions, conflicts, tragedies and mysteries in such a way that is not only captivating and believable, but soul-stirring. It’s one thing to translate incredible real-life events into tidy paragraphs, but it’s entirely another to conjure an intricate fictional world using only the vapors of one’s imagination.

I believe that a writer who does this successfully — whose characters and plots and masterful strings of words cause readers to erupt in joyful laughter, clutch at their throats in suspense or shed stinging tears of grief — is not a writer at all. He is a magician.

I suppose this post is not so much about travel, but about the fact that my new traveling lifestyle has allowed me to reconnect with something I’d loved for so long and then lost.

Reading — whether the books were fiction or non-fiction (I love autobiographies) — always taught me something. It helped me learn new words and phrases; it opened my mind to different ideas and worldviews; and it helped me understand that every person’s life is an entirely unique experience, but we’re all more alike than we tend to think.

Then, one day, reading wasn’t about learning and growing anymore. It was about ensuring that words were cobbled together in a specific way to persuade the reader to buy this, join that or subscribe/enroll/call TODAY! For a LIMITED TIME ONLY!

The words didn’t have to inspire anyone or elicit joy or even make sense. They just had to sell.

Those are the words that have cluttered my brain for two years, the words that made my life a tiny bit worse each day. Those are the words I’ve spent the last several months clearing out.

And now there is room for new words — words like those above from Garth Stein. Those are the kind of words that I want to bounce around in my mind, emitting echoes of hope and lightness and peace in the days and weeks after I read them.

To say I am alive, I am wonderful, I am.

I am.

That is something to aspire to.

I am so happy to have room for words like these.

I am so thankful for the magicians.

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