Reading
“Yes, I liked the movie, but it wasn’t nearly as good as the book.” Did you ever hear a comment like this? I suspect so, and it supports the subject of this Thought, i.e., Reading. Reading is one of the great pleasures of life, at least for me. It accomplishes so much. It can make me happy, sad, introspective, curious, confident, pretty much a full range of responses. And what’s so cool, if we don’t want to go down the path that our reading is taking us, we can just put the reading material down! What a concept!
No matter what we’re interested in at the moment, someone else (probably many someones) had that same interest, fully developed it, and wrote an article or book on it. Reading is an inexhaustible supply of information, pre-filtered by us and delivered to us on point, totally focused and just-in-time. We can educate ourselves on almost any subject, be as selective and repetitive as we want, and train ourselves to better outcomes in life.
Now, back to the original point of a movie vs. a book. There are, admittedly, many other ways to ingest sensations and information, and we have moved through several communication formats since the printed word: radio, (movies), television, computers and our hand-held devices. And, through clever technology, they may be able to batter our senses (e.g., scare, shock) more than a book could. But the sensory response from reading is different, and I submit, superior to a visual stimulus. With reading, you and the author establish a unique communication medium, as he/she attempts to describe something and your imagination takes over and fills in the rest of the picture. And in many cases goes beyond where the author was, to create a “place” of your own choosing. Reading exercises your mind like nothing else can. Who’s with me on this?
enough