It was around the end of 2019, the beginning of 2020. The pandemic had well and truly entered our lives. Work was now being done remotely, and we went out every now and then to take a walk or go to the supermarket. I had already finished the series I wanted to watch and the films, and I began wondering whether I would enter the difficult battlefield of books.
I had noted down many books that I wanted to read, but because of work before Covid, I never bought them. So I said:
“If you don’t do it now, it will never happen.”
So I entered to the online shop of my favorite bookstore and ordered, as I remember, around 10 books. They were the following:
Meditations - Marcus Aurelius,
Endurance - Alfred Lansing,
Walden - Thoreau,
Divine Comedy - Dante,
a collection of Pessoa’s poems and
one of Whitman’s,
a collection of Emerson’s essays,
The Art of War, and some others.
Obviously, they were delayed in arriving, but as soon as they came, I put them away, and I remember that I did not start immediately; about a week passed before I picked up the first book. I began methodically and according to a schedule, devouring the books page by page.
At some point, I realized that it would be a good idea to start noting down the passages I liked or the objections I had.
At first, I did it with Post-it notes (I don’t recommend it) while later I bought some small notepads and began transferring whatever I liked into them. The books began to take on my own character; I bent them, wrote on them, underlined them, everything. I showed them an attention that I had never shown before, at least not to something I had chosen myself.
During that period, I had begun cooking intensively at home; I had seen it as a form of psychotherapy. But I realized something. Just as we pay attention to what we consume as food for our bodies, we must show the same attention to what we feed our minds. Obviously, this does not concern only books, but everything: the conversations we have, the time we waste, and so on. And I am beginning to agree with something I had read some time ago: that we have moved beyond the Information Age and entered the Age of Attention. In the sense that everyone is competing to see who will distract each one of us.
Personally, I tend to choose to let our own selves be the ones to distract our attention. To be free in the true sense of the word, free to change our minds, to change our interests, to challenge our former selves. To change, to take risks, to be able to calm down for at least half an hour and rest from all the notifications, breaking news, emails, and everything else.
So, if you are lucky enough to be starting the journey of finding yourself during this period through books or something similar, the only things I could tell you are these two:
first, I envy you, and second, show patience and persistence; go back to an idea that challenged you, and then start again from the beginning. Show yourself the attention you deserve.
Continue the Journey
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