Thursday Seeds | Forced Readings

• Required reading for a class
  • Forced reading – Reading assignments for every night as a kid taking all the joy out of it.
• Required reading for a job
• Required reading for instructions on how to …

The resistance that shows up. If you fight, I’ll fight back. If you trick me, I’ll still evade

Forcing yourself to sit on the couch and you can’t get up until the book is done. Why? The book won’t be in your possession to read later. It’s not at the library. You get it now or never. [that’s a song, oldie but goodie]

Doing it while excited about something else.

Doing it after doing something you enjoyed.

Doing it before doing something you are looking forward to.

Doing it and enjoying the book so much so that you forgot it was a forced thing.

Saving face that you lost yourself in some fucking forced reading… tell NO ONE!  [Tell EVERYONE!]

It was forced and you don’t want your first experience in this book to – number one end and number two be so slanted or ruined by a propaganda moment from someone else.

What is first read?  What is third read like? Some people are so busy counting their first reads that they haven’t revisited those good books that they lost themselves in.  There is this perception that you are well read if you read a bunch [insert number] of books about a certain subject. A recent subject too.  And a genre if you will. And if we go to genre’s if you stay in the same one, aren’t you bored with that yet?  Just how many mysteries can you read?  How many love stories? Aren’t they all the same?  The same formula?

Your first reactions to a mystery cannot be the same the second time around. It’s not possible. (Who cares? An author). But if you read a mystery three times, did you catch all of the intended red herrings? Maybe you missed it, there are five. But you didn’t catch that last one until someone was yelling at you about coming down to set the table for dinner. Bang! There it is!

Why would you need that? How is that going to help you with life? 

Remember that girlfriend that swindled you out of a whole year of time? You could have seen that coming in two weeks of dating if you had just gone back to that book and read it three times instead of one. Are you catching on to the math and the timelines and the number of decisions you make in your life that could be different and could change the purpose or trajectory of your life, the city, your state, the planet? 

What are we doing around here? Picking our nose with a book in front of it. How dare we? How fucking dare we sit and read?

Change the world, change yourself. Read.