reading and learning the hard way
I've always enjoyed reading, but have found more and more recently that the books I read coincidentally seem to pair with some life lesson I am learning at the moment. I am one to learn the hard way, to have to feel the pain and weight of my decisions to grow from them. I once felt books could warn me of any mistakes I might make in life before I made them, but after countless rereads I've found that even their warnings could not stop me from learning through my own experience. The warnings are always there, but we are not always prepared to listen.
The wilderness, for example, didn't really matter to me until about three years ago. I played outside as a kid, sure, and I went biking in my local park, but the notion of wildlife conservationists devoting their entire lives to stop land from being used didn't move me beyond a surface level "well, at least somebody's doing something about that." Not until recently, when I've found myself crying nearly every day for the past week over the devastation North Carolina (a place very near and dear to me) faced by Hurricane Helene did I understand the magic wilderness can hold, the power it can yield, and the weight of its loss. My minor in university is in Wildlife Ecology and Conservation, in large part due to the magic I felt every time I went to North Carolina and basked in the endless beauty of the outdoors. I felt I knew what it meant to care about nature, but I hadn't grasped the half of it, not until it slipped from my hands. Terry Tempest Williams' When Women Were Birds comes to mind as the life-lesson-adjacent book for all things wild. Williams devoted much of her life to protecting her local wilderness, a fact which I was aware of and sympathetic to, but only after feeling a loss of wilderness in my life did I become empathetic to it. I read the book in a period of about four months, and could not grasp what about it was so groundbreaking about it until it happened to me.
I have always enjoyed reading, but more and more recently I find that reading is painful. Reading is a temptation that lures you in with storytelling, digs deep into your soul, and leaves you lighter or heavier for it. There is a clawing sensation on my heart I only get when I think about certain books. Pangs run through my body, sharp and sweet. I forgive the pages for not reaching out and stopping me from making many of the mistakes I have made in my life, despite reading and thinking I knew what would come of them. Reading is beautiful, but beauty comes at a cost. I am one to pay it.
ʚ ═══･୨ ꕤ ୧･═══ ɞ