A sad truth of the modern age is that few people practice the act of reading voluntarily. This is a topic that I continually take a passionate stand on, though I know it isn’t that way for many reading this; we’ll work on that. Reading isn’t just a hobby, it’s an activity necessary to the understanding of the world we inhabit and everything it contains (though, it’s also an undeniably fun way to pass time).
Yes, reading is fun. Just because it’s something you have to do for school doesn’t make it any less fun. Reading should not just be something you do to pass English class, but something that you do if you want to dig deeper into the world and how you feel about. Reading gives us an opportunity to really notice things beyond our first impressions of them. One of the several superpowers that will strike you with a book in your hand is the ability to think about the world you live in rather than maintaining the habit of merely living in it. Reading grants you the power to really notice things rather than just pass them by, while also lending us the prospect of thinking freshly and opening our mind to new opinions and perspectives.
There is a book for just about every situation you find yourself in and a poem for nearly every feeling you have. This idea is elucidated in this quote from The Catcher in the Rye: “Many, many men have been just as troubled morally and spiritually as you are right now. Happily, some of them kept records of their troubles… And it isn’t education. It’s history. It’s poetry.” Reading is the only thing we have that proves our connections and similarities with people whom we have not met, both dead and alive. The fact that we are never alone in our interpretations of life becomes evidently clear when we read our own thoughts within books written by other individuals, demonstrating that life’s greatest thoughts are communal. When we realize how similar we are to the people whose thoughts we read, there is an invisible line that stems out from ourselves to those people, connecting us. When your eyes linger over the words that have been organized into sentences by a person you have never met, you meet them in a sense that is far greater than if you had met them in the flesh, just passing by.
A really great thing about reading is that you can choose what you read (most of the time). There’s a book for everyone just as there is a movie and TV show for everyone. The facet of reading that makes it much better than TV, though, is that you are granted the privilege of interpreting it in your own way and seeing it in your head differently than anyone else who has read the very same book. Your experience with a book will always be unique and your perceptions of the world within the text will change the way you perceive your own world. A great book persuades you to inch out into a different world and live there for a while, focusing on the lives of characters and how they both mirror and contrast with your own.
If the more abstract benefits of reading weren’t enough to convince you, perhaps the knowledge of mental and physical benefits will be enough to coax you over to this side of the argument; according to Healthline, reading actually changes the networks of your mind, making them stronger than non-readers, thus earning you total bragging points. Another major benefit is that consistent reading can decrease your chances of cognitive decline as you age increases. If that’s not enough for you, it also lessens stress, which is an attribute of reading that we could all profit from. While making you a smarter, better rounded individual, the effects of reading branch out into many different aspects of life.
Reading isn’t just an obligatory assignment or something you do occasionally just to feel good about yourself. It shouldn’t be a chore or a relief once finished, but something you treasure. Savor the moments in which pages shift in the creases of your hands. Hold onto the feeling you get when words leave the page and relocate to your eager mind. Understand that history and original thoughts are being carried on with you each time that you read. Within you, they live. When you appreciate reading rather than dreading it, all of its merits will become strikingly evident, ready for you to enjoy.