Book Notes: Discipline to Whimsy

This year I have desperately tried to effect a recovery of reading. I know I complain a lot about this–a brief gander through my archives will provide you with many whole blog posts about how hard it is to read any more. The confluence of children and the Internet took some essential grounding of my experience as a person and buried it under the turgid waters of ordinary life. It’s like how they invented the printing press back in the old days, and then we had five hundred years of incredible reading, and then we invented the Internet and blew up that good thing. Why read when you can watch a cat gently patting a bird? I think we both know the answer to that catastrophic question.

So for 2017, instead of heavily piling up my writing goals (which I did have, and yes, don’t worry, I didn’t come anywhere near meeting them) I loaded myself up with the plan that I would read.

And guess what……..! I did. I won’t be able to say that I met my own goal, but I got much closer than I would have if I hadn’t pushed myself to try. In fact, if I really apply myself through the month of December, I might come up just ten books shy of the number I hoped to read and listen to. And actually, saying it that way, I might be able to crush a couple of writing projects under my ambitious heel too.

It’s very strange, but since I started to make Real and True New Year’s, what shall I call them…they’re not resolutions–I haven’t resolved to go to the gym every day, or resolved to eat better, or be a better person or anything, rather, I’ve made very detailed lists of what I wanted to Do, write this number of posts, try to write in this other kind of way, read this number of books by this time, read these certain kinds of books, and so on and so forth–I’ve managed to actually change the course of my habits and inclinations. I know this because occasionally I go back to look at the list I made and am able to definitely see if I’m making any progress or not. It’s not an ephemeral, impossible to measure resolve to improve myself.

And honestly, it hasn’t been about self improvement. I just miss reading and love writing and needed a way to break out of the doldrums of modernity’s set ways of thinking and being. And, most happily, it has sort of worked, even though I have never conceived of myself as a goal driven person. I’m the kind that waits for the last minute and then throws it together so that I can’t really be blamed when it all miserably fails, whatever it is. What’s that called? The perfectionist self sabotaging procrastinator? That’s me all the way. Except maybe not. I mean, not really at all. Now I’m a person who makes a list and methodically ticks through it, biting the incremental bits down and chewing them up and crossing them off. It’s a Christmas Miracle.

The thing about reading and writing, though, is somehow to take a very subjective, feeling based, and really more whimsical activity and try to apply the rigors of discipline to it. The first hurdle is to psychologically take the activity out of the realm of self indulgent art and put it into the category of beating oneself with restraint and rigor. Only then does the pleasure of insight and wonder have a place to emerge. ‘Oh no!’ you think, ‘I Have to sit down and finish this book right now, because I still have fifteen hundred books left to read!’ And so you do, and then you find yourself wrapped up and lost in whatever it was. Discipline marries itself to whimsy and pulls you up out of yourself.

I mean, my very goal driven girls do this. It used to exasperate me. They would take a book, count the number of chapters and then read only to be able to say they had read a certain number of pages and chapters. It was to say they had done it, not for the pure enjoyment of the thing itself. Except that, even against themselves, the words would pull them in, and they would sometimes keep on going, or come and tell me What they had read rather than the Number of Pages. I don’t know why I talking in the past tense, this is how it is right now.

Well, now I’ve gone on too long once again. So I’ll stop. And later I’ll tell you about the books. I know I keep promising, and it seems like I Never Will, but it’s on my list, so I’m definitely compelled to do it. So there you are.