Resolutions

I said to the man: I want to read more, in 2018.
And the man said: Why?
And I said: Good question.

Why's are important. When I don't feel like doing something - say the washing up, to exercise, or return a phone call - it's either because I want something else more (sleep, usually) or because I forgot why I wanted to do the thing in the first place. Chores are chores not only because they are tedious - what isn't! - but because they are imposed. By necessity, by nagging spouses, by the law. Quite often, by your own incomprehensible past self. You either never knew or forgot the why. But if you take a moment to recover the reasons, almost by magic, motivation returns.

This occurred to me one day when I was doing the washing up. I hate doing the washing up. It's so boring. I'd put it off and off all morning and now I had a legitimate reason to put it off further still: I was running late already. But then I remembered my why: I didn't want to be a crappy housemate. I was living with my sister at the time and I didn't want her coming home after a long workday to cook dinner in a dirty kitchen. In addition to which, I have this pact with Future Me: I do my best not to make its life too difficult and in return it doesn't judge me too harshly with the benefit of hindsight. It's a good deal. So here were two very good motives. Suddenly, I wanted to do the washing up. I was, in fact, quite glad to do it.

Why do a good thing for the wrong reason if you could do it for the right ones? When I first started to run, I did it because I wanted to be more like the foreign kids I met at university. Apparently exercising was cool in this part of the world. All the well-dressed people did it. So I started running. Then I fancied that it would make more attractive to the men. I became wedded to an image of myself that looked suspiciously a lot like what I'd seen in Nike adverts. And so I kept pushing myself to exercise, getting by turns angry and depressed whenever I didn't. But here's the problem with that logic: running makes you neither desirable by men nor trendy. Really, the relation between those two things and running is correlational at best. So then if those are your motives, no wonder you don't want to do it. Your inner sloth might be a sloth, but it isn't stupid: it knows when it's being lied to! Here's when I stopped having trouble motivating myself to exercise. When I learned that past age 30 your IQ begins slowly to drop - unless you exercise regularly. I looked it up and there is solid science behind this claim. These days, that fact has sunk in so thoroughly, that when several days have gone by without a good workout, I literally feel stupider. (It helps that I'm a bit of a hypochondriac, but still.) The point is - good reasons are good motivators.

Nowadays, if I don't return a call, attend a party, or run a chose, I always ask myself why. I assume it's for a good reason. Being tired is a good reason. Pushing yourself beyond the threshold of sustainability is like living off your credit card. It's either desperate or stupid. And eventually you'll pay for it way more than it's worth.

So when the man asked me why I wanted to read more, I was stunned. I couldn't think of an answer. Why wouldn't I, I attempted feebly. No wonder I had failed my 2017 Goodreads challenge. I'd forgotten my motives.

So why do I read? This is a good question, because reading is really quite expensive. It takes hours and hours and hours and if you take notes and write about and reflect upon your reading, it takes hours and hours still more. As we speak, it's Saturday night in London and I chose to stay in so I could finish reading my book. This is not self-evidently the smart choice for a 30 year-old single female. And plenty of people don't read. Smart, educated people, people whose brains are worth many tens of thousands of units of legal tender - do not read. Not regularly, anyway, not books. Most humans have no more than about six thinking hours in a day and most of us pledge that to some legal entity in return for money. Or invest it in relationships. Or in a million other ways to spend free time. So whatever my reason, it had better be good.

And it is good. I think. The reason is this. I read because reading, I find, is the best way, sometimes the only way, a way certainly well-trodden, whereby I change my mind. And changing my mind, no hyperbole, is the only thing that keeps me living.

I know when I haven't been reading for some time, because I feel utterly depressed, quite painfully. It's like being trapped in a room wherein the stultifying air's gone stale. It's agonising, like boredom, but it's worse than boredom, because it stretches infinitely in every direction. Everything I do feels tedious and uninspiring. There's no mystery of existence to be experienced, no magic. It's like walking on a bruise. Like watching daytime reruns. My mind is stuck on looping over the same old ways of looking at the world, my curiosity wanes and wilts and slowly gives way to cynicism and then I start to feel like death and then like dying. It's excruciating. The same old thoughts swirling back and forth, back and forth, back and forth, in endlessly recurring patterns, never jolting, nothing new, never any new conclusions. It's downright claustrophobic. And it can make for a pretty miserable existence. I know more than one person about whom I quite regularly think: if only you could move in thought-space just a little and change the way you interpret the world - just a little - how much wiser you would be and how much lighter-hearted!

Reading keeps me sane the way exercise keeps me sane. And staying sane is autotelic.