Now This

The "boob tube," battling technology, and learning to read again

Good morning people.

If you’re new to Kindling, welcome. This is Binge, the section of my newsletter where I give my reading recommendations and ask for yours. Please comment, share what’s moving your week along, making you think, giving you life, helping you check out from the mundane (or check in, whichever you prefer).

Today’s post is a little all over the place. I’m restructuring my daily habits, prioritizing slow things (reading, writing, spending time with my family) and ditching some of the grinding productivity I’ve become addicted to. And something magical is happening.

Photo by Olena Bohovyk on Unsplash

A couple of weeks ago I wrote a post about some of my more tortured feelings around writing, and I announced some changes I had started to make involving later nights dedicated to writing, a fountain pen, tea, and making time to stare out the window. All in all it’s going well. I’m feeling less edgy, less aggressive about my need to write. The time is there now, carved out on the schedule, reserved for when my family is fast asleep.

Doing that made me realize how disjointed I’ve been for years now. Obsessing over “making it,” a notion that has changed as time passed and I hit goals like finishing school and getting back to the mountains after living in the Midwest for over a decade. I used to think that nervous compulsion to keep moving forward no matter how my body or mind felt was what helped me across the finish line. Now I’m starting to think I achieved in spite of myself.

I’ve never been a morning person.

Yet I’ve worked as a baker and a barista on the early shift, and an opener at countless jobs. I’ve become an expert at the rush job. Jump out of bed, literally run around getting ready, catapult myself into the car, and crank the air conditioning on the way to work. Sweating. I have gotten better over time.

For example, this year I convinced myself that rather than doing my makeup in the work parking lot, I could just spend the thirty seconds it takes to throw on mascara in my own bathroom, at home, before work. I started drinking a cup of coffee at the counter instead of chugging it in the car. Big things for me.

Then a few weeks ago, I thought about how nice weekend mornings are, because I start them slowly. I stay in bed while I drink my coffee and read. And then I thought about how I could do that every morning really. It might not be for long, maybe twenty minutes, but what a life right?

So I started last week. Instead of my usual pop out of bed, I grabbed my cup of coffee and the book from my nightstand, and I read while my dogs watched pretending to sleep, waiting for any cue that the time for a morning walk had come. One morning I woke up late and only had ten minutes, but I read anyway. It was ten minutes of bliss.

I realized something. I’ve been giving time to news and reddit scrolling and social media first thing for years. Why have I been wasting time waiting for the weekend to read? There is some illusion in my life, a strange haze that has had me convinced that I need hours to find peace, days to enjoy a book. It’s a silly way to live when all I have is now. Each moment precious, every one an opportunity to connect.

Unfortunately for me, I’ve been trading mine in for some pointless, frantic rush to get somewhere.

I’ve been missing out on ten minutes here and there to indulge in a poem or listen to music. I’ve been absorbing information instead of giving space to think my own thoughts, to listen to the world around me, to open a book.

Last night, after only a week (or two?) of my new tiny habits, something happened. I was going to watch a show or scroll mindlessly before bed, something I do nearly every night. I sat on the couch, remote in hand, but the thought of turning on the TV in the gorgeous silence of my sleeping house seemed wrong somehow. Sacrilege.

I remembered a book that I wanted to read before Halloween, The Quiet Tenant by Clèmence Michallon. So I got it on Kindle, laid down in bed next to my sleeping husband, and I started to read. It doesn’t sound like much, but pulling myself away from the screens and back to what I actually like to do has been hard. I don’t know why. I think it comes down to addiction.

Once upon the 1950’s, the television took over the family home. Dinner was moved to TV trays, and shows replaced conversation. I adore story in all its formats, the boob tube is no exception. Now the Internet is here, and so are the dark forecasts by the sociologists. An epidemic of loneliness, disconnection, radicalization, depression. We all know there’s no putting the genie back in the bottle. This is the world we live in.

But if you find yourself saying that you wish your week was more like your weekend, or you wish you had time to read, it’s worth finding space for those happy little moments everyday. Ten minutes here. Thirty minutes there. Before you know it, you’re moving backwards in time, curled up with a book smuggled under the sheets long after you were supposed to be asleep.

You can keep reading when you wake up, even if it’s for fifteen minutes before you have to put on clothes and head to an office. You can pretend it’s fifth grade summer and the world is relatively uncomplicated. You can get lost in something that isn’t outrage or doom for a little while. You can learn to read again, fall in love again, remember who you were when you were a kid before the world got in and made you so worried about everything else. You can leave the dishes for one night and just indulge in another world for a while. If you ever needed permission, here you go. You can.

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P.S. I’m loving The Quiet Tenant. It’s a story about a serial killer, told from the perspective of those closest to him: his daughter, his girlfriend, and the victim he spared. I’m only a quarter of the way through, but I highly recommend it on prose alone.

What about all of you? Do you have any of your own stories for slowing down life (as much as you’re able)? How is the information age treating you?