Happy New Year! Just enough time to keep up the daily post. It’s also time to start a new theme for January. This month it’s all about those moments of connection when we read a.k.a. everything I know I learned from books.
I like the notion of the autodictat: someone who teaches themselves. Some people have made their way through life like that, whether through bad experiences with school – or less of it than they would have liked.
Being able to teach yourself is also one of those things formal education is meant to instill, isn’t it? It used to be enough to teach facts – now it’s the thing to teach people how to think, so they can continue finding things out for themselves.
I like finding out new things. (And yes, I did like school. And education in general.) So three cheers for the internet, making it easy to find out more about something, and, dare I say it, a little about everything.
At this time in history, it seems to be where we’re going in our quest for information – whether it’s browsing Wikipedia, narrowing our search terms for Google, or other sorts of hunting for things.
But still. There are points when we’re not hunting for things, but they find us: truths, insights, points of commonality with an author or a character. We feel we’re not alone. We feel vindicated in our outlook on life.
It’s a form of book review, I guess. It may be the things I found important. They may in fact be very trivial things, but ones where I felt understood at the point of reading.
We read to find ourselves. We read to find ourselves in others’ stories – or to find courage in an aspect of our story. And, sometimes, these things provide a foundation for the rest of what life brings along.
And yes, I kind of hope you might like some of the books. But really, it’s about hoping you too will be found in what you come across in books.
In a source of words that you can hold in your hand, that you can wrap around you, in a way that the internet can never fully do.
Whatever forms of self-expression or self-exploration you may aspire to, at the start of a new year – books are an awfully good place to begin.