reading

Read.

Posted on by Shari Swanson

Nowhere can you experience life from someone else’s point of view better than in a book. You can feel what it is like to be another gender, race, lifeform. Time is no limitation–you might experience life now, in the past, in the future. Opening those pages allows you to step inside someone else’s shoes. And that can’t help but change you, stretch your empathy, and expand your experience.

What would it be like if you could talk over things with those characters? Ask them about life in their shoes?

In a very cool project, doing exactly that, library patrons have the chance to check out a human book. Hopefully the human book they check out will be someone with a different life experience and perspective.

So check out a book, or maybe talk with someone as unlike from you as you can find. You’ll be surprised at all the things you have in common.

Communing with ghosts.

Posted on by Shari Swanson

There is a sort of magic in reading a book. Someone, maybe long dead, has perhaps expressed deep feelings or new thoughts or complex theories, writing out of their aloneness, and connecting with someone they have never met and may never meet.

And yet the impact of that shared space over a book can be life-changing. It can help you feel less alone in this big world. It can help you feel empathy for others in a way you may never have experienced without the book. It can open your heart and mind in new and wonderful ways.

Book magic

Posted on by Shari Swanson

There is a certain alchemy in writing a book. Where do ideas come from? How do they knit together to form a story? What elevates words to resonate with a reader’s inner self? An author may seem like a bit of a magician conjuring elements, or perhaps a conductor taming orchestral components together to make music.

But reading can be even more magical. Words written by a stranger maybe years ago can resonate deeply and touch your soul. Fictional characters can be more real to you than the people you see every day. You can curl up on your couch with a book and be completely transported into another place and time in a way that feels so astonishingly real that when you put down the book, you temporarily lose your bearings. And sometimes you can read something that travels through time and space to speak directly to your troubled heart and give you peace.

W.B. Yeats put it this way:

Where My Books Go

All the words that I gather,
And all the words that I write,
Must spread out their wings untiring,
And never rest in their flight,
Till they come where your sad, sad
heart is,
And sing to you in the night,
Beyond where the waters are moving,
Storm darkened or starry bright.

Plunge into life.

Posted on by Shari Swanson

book2

Plunging into a good book expands your empathy, takes you to places you’ve never experienced, and lets you walk in the shoes of someone who thinks, acts, and lives in a way different from you. And you can fall in love, again and again, with the perfectly flawed, endearing characters you encounter there. It helps you realize that the world is complex and full of many perspectives and life experiences, that your way is not the only way, that you are one thread in an infinite, glorious tapestry of life.

 

Read.

Posted on by Shari Swanson

boyread

Reading opens our hearts. There may be no better way to stand in someone else’s shoes and look at the world from their point of view, to understand a life and world experience wholly different from our own. The inevitable result of experiencing the world from someone else’s perspective is empathy. And empathy moves us closer into recognizing our kinship, one and all.