The Art of Not Reading

I’m writing this post from a hospital bed. Not close to dying in any way, but recuperating from a couple of worst days in my life.

Have you ever wondered what you would leave behind if you had died today? A house or an apartment, furniture, books, and electronics, maybe photos of you with your loved ones. What usually comes first to mind are your material possessions.

Your life in an appropriate-sized box.

Now imagine your grandchild, whom you never met, that comes into possession of those items and tries to piece together the person behind it. How well, if ever, would those things describe you? Your dreams and struggles, everything that you stand for, your accomplishments, and every failure and heartbreak after which you kept going.

You need to leave them more than that. You have to pass on your dreams, struggles, and aspirations. Your thoughts, your ideas, your creativity. Challenges that you faced and how you failed or overcame them. You need to leave them a piece of yourself.

To leave all that, you have to start expressing yourself. By writing, creating art, painting, sculpting, and, if that’s not your deal, building, engineering, and documenting every step of your journey.

We’re swallowed by our daily routines. Thrown into a mass media machine with the simple goal of consuming content.

Switch off your TV and Internet, sit in your place of focus, think, and transfer it to your notebook on canvas.

Nothing in this world is this trivial anymore. Now you have to take that neural mucus of yours and mold it into an expression of yourself. Disassemble your thoughts, inspect them closely, arrange them, and put them back together in a different shape or order.

The key is to keep going. Start and never ever stop. Learn to hate it, leave it, and get back to it. Now all it’s left to do is hope. So that by the time you are called to step down from the stage, your piece will be whole, and you will be understood.

This post is titled the art of not reading. When writing it, the point I was trying to make was too general. It has nothing to do with wasting time reading books/all over the internet. But then I thought to myself.

You’re still reading the post, aren’t you?