Tuesday
Jul292008
Motivate Me - The Daily Dose of Motivational Medicine - Empty Shelves
What are you reading?
No, I'm not talking about this e-zine. What are you reading? What do you have sitting on your bedside table? What do you have tucked away in your bag? What do you do when you are travelling to and from work? What is filling your mind?
For me, all reading is pleasure. Reading and what we choose to read is entirely that - a choice, our choice. and that makes me feel blessed. OK, there were times when we were asked to read something - for a school assignment, a research paper, an item of interest, but in general terms everything we read is our choice.
Can you imagine walking through a library that contained every book you've ever read? Each title sits proudly on the shelf, next to its neighbours. Occassionally there will be a well thumbed one, the pages tattered and torn, spines cracked. There will be magazines falling over and gaps on the shelves.
Every book you've ever picked up and read is there, your personal memory.
I've worked out that my personal library would contain upwards of 10,000 books. That's not written to impress you, in fact it breaks down to reading between 4-6 books every week for the last 35 years. Assuming I started reading properly by the time I was 8. Which isn't very many at all when you stop and think about it. But a 10,000 item library - now that would look sort of impressive. Well I think so.
So imagine being able to take a walk through your personal library.
You'd find the cloth books still wet from chewing as a child. Card backed books with bright colours and simple pictures and large words. The adventure stories you read under the bed covers with a torch....and the adult mags you managed to buy and drool over when you thought no-one knew what you were doing. The school texts with bookmarks and high lighted passages.
And then you stop - the bookshelves keep on appearing in front of you - but the further you move through your library the fewer books there are on your shelves. In fact there are more gaps than books. Occassionally there will be a cluster - the odd health and fitness book, diet books and motivational program from someone who promised you the world for a down payment of $19.95 and three equal installments of .... along with things that interested you for a while. Those odd travel guide books, the books on train spotting, the knitting patterns and the crosswords, the print outs from the pages you've downloaded from the Internet, bound together.
An eclectic mix of thoughts, gathered together in your own personal library.
There's a chair in the corner, so you sit for a while. From this vantage point you can see every shelf. And because this is your library you can see all the titles....spanning across the centuries, the minds and the worlds you explored.
And then you notice something - a television is running through all the programmes you've ever watched....flickering images....no sound. Hour upon hour of repeats and re-runs, day time soaps and news stories, movies and laughter.
You can hear talking....sssshh it's a library - but the words jumble over themselves, and you listen a little more closely - voices you recognise, conversations you've had, every word recorded. Every word and image filed away - stored in our own personal computers.
Disturbed you get up and try to leave...but there are two doors. One is labelled CURRENT the other FUTURE.
Which door do you choose.
No, I'm not talking about this e-zine. What are you reading? What do you have sitting on your bedside table? What do you have tucked away in your bag? What do you do when you are travelling to and from work? What is filling your mind?
For me, all reading is pleasure. Reading and what we choose to read is entirely that - a choice, our choice. and that makes me feel blessed. OK, there were times when we were asked to read something - for a school assignment, a research paper, an item of interest, but in general terms everything we read is our choice.
Can you imagine walking through a library that contained every book you've ever read? Each title sits proudly on the shelf, next to its neighbours. Occassionally there will be a well thumbed one, the pages tattered and torn, spines cracked. There will be magazines falling over and gaps on the shelves.
Every book you've ever picked up and read is there, your personal memory.
I've worked out that my personal library would contain upwards of 10,000 books. That's not written to impress you, in fact it breaks down to reading between 4-6 books every week for the last 35 years. Assuming I started reading properly by the time I was 8. Which isn't very many at all when you stop and think about it. But a 10,000 item library - now that would look sort of impressive. Well I think so.
So imagine being able to take a walk through your personal library.
You'd find the cloth books still wet from chewing as a child. Card backed books with bright colours and simple pictures and large words. The adventure stories you read under the bed covers with a torch....and the adult mags you managed to buy and drool over when you thought no-one knew what you were doing. The school texts with bookmarks and high lighted passages.
And then you stop - the bookshelves keep on appearing in front of you - but the further you move through your library the fewer books there are on your shelves. In fact there are more gaps than books. Occassionally there will be a cluster - the odd health and fitness book, diet books and motivational program from someone who promised you the world for a down payment of $19.95 and three equal installments of .... along with things that interested you for a while. Those odd travel guide books, the books on train spotting, the knitting patterns and the crosswords, the print outs from the pages you've downloaded from the Internet, bound together.
An eclectic mix of thoughts, gathered together in your own personal library.
There's a chair in the corner, so you sit for a while. From this vantage point you can see every shelf. And because this is your library you can see all the titles....spanning across the centuries, the minds and the worlds you explored.
And then you notice something - a television is running through all the programmes you've ever watched....flickering images....no sound. Hour upon hour of repeats and re-runs, day time soaps and news stories, movies and laughter.
You can hear talking....sssshh it's a library - but the words jumble over themselves, and you listen a little more closely - voices you recognise, conversations you've had, every word recorded. Every word and image filed away - stored in our own personal computers.
Disturbed you get up and try to leave...but there are two doors. One is labelled CURRENT the other FUTURE.
Which door do you choose.
July 29, 2008 at 18:19
Reader Comments (2)