It is important to realize the fundamental and vital role that books play in our lives. Books are vehicles for education, connection, and entertainment. Books serve many purposes both for those who write them and those who read them. The wisdom, knowledge, experience, history, and imperative information imparted through the reading of books enriches us and connects us as it weaves, within our over-all experience in life, a tapestry of what the journey of humanity entails and encompasses.
When one loves to read each and every book represents a world waiting to be born. The love of reading is experienced actively. It is not a passive past-time. It is not a solitary pursuit. How can it be when there is company and acquaintance to be had within the pages of these printed worlds?
The endeavour of reading from a place of loving to read is an enlightening unfolding journey that nurtures both the mind and the soul. Reading is always an enlightening experience on one level or another.
When we open a book we invest our time, thoughts, and often our emotions in that book. We share the journey of the writer. We connect with the writer and the subject matter. We relate to characters in fiction, we relate to the writers of memoirs, we relate to people from the past whose historical stories we read. We learn more about ourselves as a result of the reality of these experienced connections to others and/or to the elements of the human condition that we read about.
The reading of books also very much forms the basis of much of what we think about. Reading books helps us to further educate ourselves on endless topics. Reading books can be everything from life-saving, life-changing, to life enhancing. Each time we experience the world of another book we deepen our understanding of ourselves.
Information is one of the most powerful resources that we as human beings have to share. This information is now being shared in concert with our explosive and ever-evolving technology.
Ebooks and audio books have revolutionized the delivery of information. They provide an often immediate experience of connecting the writer to the reader via the internet. And yet these means of delivering books to people’s computer screens have become welcome adjuncts to traditional books and have not replaced traditional books as was first feared they might some years ago. Surely this has to the best of all possible worlds for those who love reading.
Sitting and reading a book is in an intimate and self-directed journey that strengthens our ability to think. Reading is a much-needed and much-loved enterprise that augments our individual understanding of the collective shared reality of every aspect of human life, past, present, and sometimes future as well.
The writing and reading of books is a major way that we seek to both celebrate the uniqueness of the many worlds of individuality and the experience of the evolutionary-enlightenment that can be found in the increased mindful awareness of what it means to accept just how connected our individual worlds are within the larger world itself. Reading a book is a very real way to garner from that connectedness a deep understanding that we are much more alike than we are different. Each one of us is truly a world within a world that is an extension of the worlds that we experience and read about in books.
Books may technically be inanimate objects but within their covers, to the reader, they come alive. When you love to read you know that reading is not just a passive exercise. It is an active experience.
When one loves to read every book is a world waiting to be born.
© A.J. Mahari – All rights reserved.