Read All About It

I think I'm approaching my mid-life crisis.

I'm not likely to want to buy a Corvette or get a divorce so that I can date someone significantly younger than I am, and I certainly hope that I'm not at the actual mid-point of my life (I'd rather live beyond 68, thank you very much), but I'm feeling a certain level of panic when I think about how much I still have to read and write before I die. Is that weird?

While I know it isn't a competition, I feel like I'm losing to...well, most everyone when it comes to knocking down titles. There is so much to take in: volumes and tomes and treatises and film and music and video games and...and...and... I feel a bit like Veruca Salt when it comes to intellectually ingesting as much as I possibly can. I don't care how: I want it now.

This is the only version of the story, aside from the book, that I accept. (Source)

The direct corollary to this has to be my job. Over the last nine years, I've been learning more and more in order to better teach my courses. (I even have a new class that I've never thought about before, say, last month that I'm suddenly teaching, so, yeah, that creates a nice surge of panic whene'er I think on 't.) That impulse to learn more, to never be satisfied with what I already know (and, more often, forgotten), to have the Socratic desire to learn as I do to breathe, to not let my job as an educator get in the way of my education--it's all grown in me much more heavily in the last year or two.

I do put it toward a type of existential dread. Mormonism teaches that the more you learn, the better off you'll be after you die, since knowledge and experiences will stick around in your spirit (see Doctrine and Covenants 130: 18-19). This gives a great incentive to read and write as much as I can before I go. Of course, there's also the concept that the afterlife, being infinite, means that I don't have to stress about things now, since I'll have infinity to catch up. But that paradox isn't even what is fueling the dread. No, it's the idea of running out of time.

I was listening to the end of Hamilton (again) today, and the final song, "Who Lives, Who Dies, Who Tells Your Story" poses one of the great, unanswerable questions that history raises: What would you do if you'd had more time? For some people, we can see glimmers of their potential, we can surmise the way they'd positively affect the world. (I think, for example, of Wilfred Owen.) But there are so many people who live, die, and though their story circulates in family orbits for some amount of time, it doesn't linger. Its shelf-life is limited. But others--Alexander Hamilton definitely being one of them, but hardly the only one--had such spectacular trajectories that their deaths crippled the advancement of the human race. For some, that would be John Lennon or perhaps John Kennedy. Certainly Martin Luther King, Jr.--and that's only recent history. The questions can go back to person after person. Heavens, what if Julius Caesar hadn't fallen on the ides so many centuries back? What would the world be like with a living Caesar?

There's a danger to this line of thinking, and most of it involves delusions of grandeur. I know I'm not another Caesar, Hamilton, or even Owen. My impact is minor and minute and of geological insignificance. Nevertheless, because I have this one tiny way of making a difference--usually in the form of 45 kids or so a year--I really want it to be substantial wherever I can.

Hence my thirst for reading.

So how do I go about doing this? Well, here are a couple of tricks that I'm pushing on really hard right now, though I'm certain there are other ways of reading more books in a year than what I'm doing (which, at this rate, I'll hit the 100 books over the course of the year sometime in November):

1. Have multiple titles
1. This means that there's always something for me to read. History books, anthologies, mainstream fiction, science fiction of sundry types (dystopia and military opera, right now), fantasy, classics, and literary theory/philosophy. Whatever I'm in the mood for, I have something I'm picking at.
2. Use my phone
1. I keep my Kindle app loaded with comic books and a couple of other books, most of which I've checked out from the digital library. The Kindle app, in particular, helps with point number three. Many of the books can use the Word Runner feature, which lets me read about 450 words per minute
3. Speed read
1. This is done on the phone as I mentioned above, but I've also taken to reading with a bookmark. When we were kids, we learned to read by dragging our finger underneath the words. Eventually, we stopped doing that. But using a bookmark to keep my eyes focused on the right line helps a great deal in speeding up my reading. When it comes to novels, especially, I like to read quickly, because it makes the narrative more cohesive that way. This doesn't work for poetry or philosophy, which requires me to slow down. Nevertheless, I'm reading more because I'm actively trying to increase my speed.
4. Ditch the social media
1. I love Twitter. I scarcely tolerate Facebook. I refuse to install Instagram or Snapchat. There are some valid reasons (like increasing your anxiety) for having social media. In order to cut down on Twitter time, I make sure that I have comics loaded on my phone. They're easy to read, and that way a fifteen minute wait at the pharmacy turns into significant progress in something that I'm interested in, rather than thumbing through the latest rants about how corrupt our government is.
5. Audiobooks
1. Love these. Absolutely love them. Today, in fact, I finished one and started another already queued up, plus I have a larger one that I can pick at whenever the mood strikes me. Because I do the dishes, there's a guaranteed thirty or so minutes a night where I can listen to something. Sometimes I get distracted by YouTube videos, but for the most part, I listen to my audiobooks. I've probably listened to a dozen books of various lengths so far this year. It's divine.

So, while I'm not at all satisfied with my current intake of creativity, I'm improving how much I can read all about it...whatever it may be.