I rarely listen.
No, seriously, I do not make it a habit of listening to others (just ask my husband who would be more than happy to talk about how much fun that can be). But, that also includes NOT listening to myself or my spirit, the internal nudges, whatever you want to call it, that exists to guide us. Instead, I tend to plow headlong, attempting to check off these impossible to-do lists and fulfill this grand notion of what it means to be a wife, mother, writer, volunteer. When I cannot, say, write a brilliant poem a day (really, who made that rule for me) or create some culinary masterpiece for the ingrates who would undoubtedly be happier with a Hot & Ready from Little Ceasars, it becomes difficult to feel like I have reached any destination at all.
So, this past month I did something very different.
I listened.
At the beginning of January, I wrote in my journal that I wanted to be a better reader, a more prolific reader. I wanted to reconnect to what made me fall in love with words back in elementary school. I wanted to be that book nerd who spent some portion of the summers in the San Benito Public Library getting paper cuts in the long wooden drawers of the card catalog, watching the due date get stamped in the front cover of each book, eventually hauling out armloads of books to count towards my Summer Reading Contest. That is who I wanted to be this year.
So I read thirteen books in the month of January.
I cannot remember the last time I felt this giddy. As I look at that mountain of words sitting on my desk I cannot help but feel like I climbed an Everest of sorts and planted a flag firmly in the top. I set out to read this month, and read is what I did.
No, seriously, I do not make it a habit of listening to others (just ask my husband who would be more than happy to talk about how much fun that can be). But, that also includes NOT listening to myself or my spirit, the internal nudges, whatever you want to call it, that exists to guide us. Instead, I tend to plow headlong, attempting to check off these impossible to-do lists and fulfill this grand notion of what it means to be a wife, mother, writer, volunteer. When I cannot, say, write a brilliant poem a day (really, who made that rule for me) or create some culinary masterpiece for the ingrates who would undoubtedly be happier with a Hot & Ready from Little Ceasars, it becomes difficult to feel like I have reached any destination at all.
So, this past month I did something very different.
I listened.
At the beginning of January, I wrote in my journal that I wanted to be a better reader, a more prolific reader. I wanted to reconnect to what made me fall in love with words back in elementary school. I wanted to be that book nerd who spent some portion of the summers in the San Benito Public Library getting paper cuts in the long wooden drawers of the card catalog, watching the due date get stamped in the front cover of each book, eventually hauling out armloads of books to count towards my Summer Reading Contest. That is who I wanted to be this year.
So I read thirteen books in the month of January.
I cannot remember the last time I felt this giddy. As I look at that mountain of words sitting on my desk I cannot help but feel like I climbed an Everest of sorts and planted a flag firmly in the top. I set out to read this month, and read is what I did.
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