Reading Is the Original Slow Living

Everything seems to want us to move faster.

Messages want replies. Notifications want attention. There is always another tab open, another job waiting, another thing we could be doing.

Even our downtime can become strangely busy.

We scroll while watching television. Check our phones while waiting for something to load. Listen to something while doing something else.

And then there is a book.

A book is wonderfully unreasonable.

It asks us to sit down, pay attention and do one thing at a time.

Perhaps that's why reading can feel like such a relief.

A book doesn't need us to hurry

You can skim a webpage.

You can watch a video at double speed.

You can scroll through hundreds of posts in the time it takes to read a handful of pages.

But a story doesn't really work like that.

It unfolds at the speed you read it.

Page by page.

Sentence by sentence.

And there is something rather lovely about an activity that simply refuses to be rushed.

A book doesn't care how many emails you've answered, how many steps you've walked or whether you've made good use of your afternoon.

It only asks you to turn the page.

Sometimes reading makes the rest of the world go quiet

I know this feeling very well.

When I become properly lost in a book, I can physically feel myself beginning to settle.

My breathing slows. I become less aware of everything happening around me. The endless list of things I should be thinking about seems to move further into the background.

It feels like giving my brain a rest while my mind creates the world of the story.

And that distinction fascinates me.

Because reading isn't really a passive activity at all.

While one part of us is becoming quieter, another part is incredibly busy.

Our imagination starts building

An author might tell us that a character has dark hair, is tall and has a scar above one eyebrow.

But somehow, by chapter three, we've created an entire person.

We know their face.

We know how they move.

We may even know what their voice sounds like.

The same thing happens with places.

A writer gives us a room, a street, a house or a landscape — but our imagination starts filling in the gaps.

Where is the window?

How high is the ceiling?

What does the light look like?

What can the character see when they step outside?

The author provides the words.

We quietly build the world around them.

And every reader builds a slightly different one.

Every reader directs their own version of the story

Perhaps this is one of the reasons books can feel so personal.

Two people can read exactly the same novel and experience slightly different worlds.

Your version of the house isn't quite the same as mine.

Your heroine may be taller.

My detective has a deeper voice.

Neither of us is necessarily wrong.

The author has given us enough to begin — and our imaginations have done the rest.

Which also explains one of the great hazards of being a reader:

the film adaptation.

“That's not what they look like!”

Surely I'm not the only person who has watched a film adaptation of a book and immediately thought:

No.

That's not him.

That's not what she looks like.

That house is completely wrong.

And why is that room over there?

😂

It's a ridiculous complaint when you think about it.

The character never actually had a face.

But they did to us.

We may have spent hours with our version of that person before an actor appeared on screen claiming to be them.

Sometimes the film gets remarkably close.

Sometimes the casting is wonderful.

And sometimes you spend the first twenty minutes thinking:

Well, I don't know who that man is, but he certainly isn't the character from my book.

That's the peculiar magic of reading.

We don't simply receive somebody else's finished world.

We participate in creating it.

Reading gives our everyday thoughts somewhere else to go

Perhaps that's why becoming absorbed in a book can feel so restorative.

Our minds haven't stopped working.

They're just working on something completely different.

Instead of tomorrow's jobs, we're wondering what is behind the locked door.

Instead of thinking about the washing, we're somewhere in 1920s Paris.

Instead of replaying a conversation, we're trying to work out whether a fictional person we've known for approximately 87 pages can be trusted.

Our imagination is busy.

But the everyday noise has quietened.

Reading slows the world down without asking the imagination to stand still.

And perhaps we've made reading too productive too

There are reading targets.

Reading challenges.

Lists of books we're apparently supposed to read before we're thirty, forty, fifty or dead.

There are apps counting books, pages and reading streaks.

And if those things make reading more enjoyable, wonderful.

But reading doesn't have to achieve anything.

You don't have to read fifty books this year.

You don't have to finish the classics.

You don't have to improve yourself.

You don't even have to finish the book you're currently reading if you're secretly avoiding it because you're bored stiff.

Sometimes reading can simply be:

I have twenty minutes. I'm going to read my book.

That's enough.

Twenty minutes counts

We sometimes imagine reading requires an entire quiet afternoon, a perfect chair and several uninterrupted hours.

Lovely when it happens.

Not terribly realistic most days.

Ten minutes before bed counts.

Twenty minutes while you're waiting for something counts.

Half an hour on a Sunday morning counts.

And occasionally you begin reading for twenty minutes, look up considerably later and discover that the afternoon has quietly disappeared.

Those days count too.

Possibly more. 😂

The important part isn't how much we read.

It's that for a little while, we allow ourselves to stop doing everything else.

Reading may be the original slow living

Long before anybody called it slow living, people were doing something beautifully simple.

Finding somewhere comfortable.

Opening a book.

And disappearing for a while.

No productivity required.

No optimisation.

No need to document the experience.

Just one person, one story and enough time to see where it leads.

Perhaps that's why reading still feels so valuable in a world determined to compete for every spare second of our attention.

A book asks something different of us.

Stay here.

Pay attention.

Imagine.

Turn the page when you're ready.

The world can carry on being noisy for a while.

We'll come back to it.

Right now, we've got somewhere else to be.

Wherever today finds you, I hope you find a story worth getting lost in.

— BookBuddies