It’s Summer Reading Season!

Ever since I read my first “chapter book” in 2nd grade (Detective Zack and the Adventure on Thunder Mountain), reading has been a big part of my life. I owe a lot to my mom for reading aloud to me before bed when I was a kid. And post-Detective Zack, emerging from the public library with a chin-high stack of books was a regular occurrence in my life. Searching among the library shelves, I also discovered the stories of Lloyd Alexander, Ursula LeGuin, Madeleine Le’Engle, and others. Multi-volume fantasy series were the mainstay, though the occasional historical fiction novel would also find its way into the mix. First Chronicles of Narnia, then Harry Potter, then Redwall took their places in my pantheon of favorites.

Of course I read Lord of the Rings when I was old enough. Though I think I jumped the gun a bit on that one, because I literally got lost the first time I read it. I mistakenly thought that the mines of Moria were a passage into Mordor, and was confused the whole second book. I was thinking: Why are they wandering around so much? What’s with this random Rohan horse place? Just throw the ring in the volcano already. I re-read it a few years later, when the movies were coming out, and my comprehension was a lot better. There were other series I got into once I was old enough for them as well: Garth Nix’s Sabriel, the Bartemaeus Trilogy, Mistborn (well, in that case, the series just wasn’t written until I was older).

An Invertebrate Creature of Jelly-like Constituency

Every time I’m on break, I have to deal with the unsettling dynamic of moving from a structured, fairly routine life to a much more amorphous existence. It’s vertebrate to invertebrate: un-vertebration.

So, this is me right now:

When I’m busy, I long for free time, to escape from the shackles of schedule. And a day off is wonderful. But when summer hits and I have whole weeks of freedom, it isn’t actually that great. I think work and rest compliment each other, and we get out of sorts when we only have one and not the other.

I’ve been thinking: It’s kind of existentially straining to not have any routines. There’s comfort and strength to be found in repetition. Think of the fundamental rhythms that under-gird our lives: day and night, the three meals, the holidays, the weeks, months and years. People associate jazz with spontaneity and improvisation, but really that improvisation takes place within a highly structured skeleton of tempo, key, form, and style.

I would argue that likewise humans in general work best when we have a foundational skeleton of routine and tradition to “improvise” on top of. There’s only so much choice we can handle psychologically; if we have too many decisions to make, we get overwhelmed and have trouble making any of them. And socially too, some things need to be set, if only for coordination. We drive on the right side of the road. Why? Because we all have to drive on the same side! So it’s too simplistic to say that the more freedom a person has, the better, and that anything that reduces the amount of choice in a person’s life is to be labeled as constraining (and thus to be fought). That being ‘tied down’ means unhappiness. I’d say it’s just as likely that not having a place to tie down would lead to unhappiness.

My Blog is a Zombie

It’s back! Risen from the coffin and shaking off that grave dirt, the horror-movie-style silhouette stumbles along against the moonlight…

Ok, maybe I’m being melodramatic. Suffice it to say, bluntly, that it’s been more than a year since my last post. I think my journal competes with the blog, especially when time is limited. Still, they’re different mediums. Here, there’s an audience (such as it is). In my journal, I’m writing to my future self, and that changes what I focus on and how I write.

But ideally, since the journal and the blog are different mediums and serve different purposes, I would write for both.

And writing in general is something I want to be more intentional about.

For one, it keeps me sane. Life in modern America is fast-pasted and complex. When I don’t write I can lose track of a coherent and organizing narrative for my life. When I do write, I can live more thoughtfully and intentionally. I can discern the topography of days.