Once you begin reading something, you usually commit the energy and time to stick with it. You are searching for something. When you read the headline or the title, the opening paragraph, you are deciding whether or not to proceed with the piece. Will I find nourishment? Will I learn something new? Is there information here that will advance my understanding of the subject? Or, even, will I be distracted in a pleasurable way, entertained?
We are not in fucking school anymore. Nobody is making us read anything. (And curse them for doing so back then!) We read what we want to read. We don't want to waste time with fluff or bullshit, lies, misinformation, tackiness, didactic trash. We want to be educated, uplifted, fostered, cultivated by the stream and tiny black symbol clusters. We want to be transformed, even just incrementally. Ideally we want a little bit of magic.
And words can be magic. It's one of those things. I think the word I am looking for is; ethereal.
We may not even be quite sure what we are seeking before we begin to read something. We just know that we'll know when we find it. We become like detectives, sifting through the evidence in front of us, searching for clues that will add up to a reasonable deduction. We want to crack the case and the case is life itself. Cause, face it, we are actively living in and fully engaged in an ongoing mystery. One that is yet to be solved. Who knows what we could stumble upon in our investigations - through reading, or writing for that matter.
Writers are adventurers. Leaders, mostly solo, the advance party, trackers. We are curious, we like to analyse, build, invent. We work with concept. We are fuelled by imagination. Often we enamoured by the musicality of words and phrases. We ride the sets of thoughts like a surfer does the waves. The more practiced and adept we get, the bigger the surf we take on. Unlike the physical realm, there is no fear involved. Nobody ever got injured writing down their thoughts. But it is about confidence. The more we write, the more we are able to attempt with the next one. We get bored with what we have done, said, thought and written already. We seek new horizons. Not always new, though, sometimes it's the familiar that holds the secret riches. In this case we go deeper. We delve. Nice word: delve.
And the whole time, whatever it is we are doing, writing about, we are rewarded with tasty treats that pop into our heads and are expressed though our hands. Our minds get to reflect their magnificence. Our higher selves are offered an outlet. If we can get out of our own way, we can occasionally tap into the sublime, the wonder, the exquisite soulful limitlessness that resides within us all but is mostly disguised and interrupted by the static of daily living.
In this sense, writing is truly of the most pure pursuits available to us. In tandem with reading, it is an activity that can lift us up out of the ordinary and transport us, offer us a bridge from what is to what could be. We have to return eventually, to our homes in the physical realm, but for the time that we are away, we are liberated, suspended in the divine dimension of unlimited possibility.
And that is a nice place to be.