Zen College Life

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This week we will focus on reading. As a child I was never a fan of books. I didn’t understand the significance of hundreds of pages of words, nor did I care for the ‘knowledge’ they claimed to contain. But about a year ago (at age 22), I started reading religiously, not because I enjoyed it, but because it seemed the fastest way to learn, grow, and live richer. I started out hating it, I was slow, I didn’t understand everything I read, and I felt dumb. But soon I realized that the very feeling of being dumb was liberating. Allow me to explain…

By not being confined to being intelligent in any one area or field, but rather dabbling in many subjects I was able to broaden my horizons, become more educated in many fields, and grow in many aspects. And the more I read, the more I learned about, the more I wanted to learn about, the more I wanted to read. I knew something had changed the moment I was interested in reading a book about my least favorite subject: History. Reading changed what history was for me. No longer was history a set of facts useless to my life. History was now a wonderful journey through the life of the world. By learning what and how others lived their lives I could model how to live my life in order to achieve similar results. History was the perfect model of what to do, and even better on what not to do.

I’m in no way a great reader. I still have difficulty retaining all of the information I read. But the ability to read is such a wonderful gift. With a library card knowledge becomes free. With such great amounts of knowledge available, there is no good excuse to not achieve greatness, whatever that means to you. If you are not yet a serious reader, I urge you to pick up a book, magazine, subscribe to a blog. Do anything that will feed you information through words instead of TV. Choose a subject you love now, even if you think you know everything about it. You will find that everything is interconnected, and soon you will find yourself half way through a book on a subject you never enjoyed before, and what’s even greater, you’ll find yourself loving every second of it. I know I do.

What do you think about reading? What do you read? How does reading make you feel? Leave a comment and let me know. I’d love to hear from you.

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