Read, Apply, Repeat
For a few years I'd been doing pretty well at reading. Just…reading books. No specific goal in mind other than addressing my increasingly threatening “unread” pile. Then, after a couple of losses and transitions, I fell off the wagon. I'll spare you the details but, basically for about a year and a half it was hard for me to concentrate on words on the page.
I had the usual problems I think a lot of people have: Feeling like the words just weren't going into my brain. Having to backtrack to reread entire pages. I tried shifting to things I thought I'd like -- entries in series that I'd started but hadn't finished, stuff by authors I'm super into -- but I just ended up slogging through one book every three or four months, including a novel I was excited to read.
I tried making time for reading every day. making my reading spaces more calming. using reading guides. But those things weren't really working for me, for where I was.
Then two things happened.
First: My niece got married and last fall. The wedding was profoundly literature inspired. Poetry was read during the ceremony, there were pages from books as visual motifs, and they even had a published fiction author as their officiant. It made me go “that's right, I want a life that's steeped in this sort of thing, or at least a life where creativity and storytelling are ubiquitous.”
Second: I applied what I'd been reading. I picked up Atomic Habits late in 2024 (and didn't finish reading it until early 2025) and in it, James Clear talks about just doing the thing. Even if you aren't shooting for perfection or doing high quality work. Just show up; doing it repeatedly, even badly, creates an underlying foundation that allows you to focus on tweaking it later. But I found an additional component worked for me: asking myself what the takeaways are from the book, even for fiction, however abstract they might be. That made it far more interesting!
So, for example:
What the Robin Knows is a book about the dynamics of how birds communicate. It made me pause and wonder, How can I have a more holistic and sympathetic understanding of the world outside of myself?
How to Raise a Wild Child is a parenting book about getting your kids outside, encouraging them to get dirty, and providing them with opportunities to thrive without rigid, adult-oriented structure. This made me consider ways to step out of my own anxieties as a parent, and a partner, to take responsibility as a small part of a greater constellation in the lives of others.
I also read the Percy Jackson series after it was recommended to me by my son. On one hand, as a middle-grade fantasy story about preteen demigods, it’s supposed to be a whimsical American version of Harry Potter. But on another, more accurate hand, it’s about Greek gods being unapologetically shitty parents by forcing their own children to fight on their behalf, and only really for pride and glory. As I looked to the secondary antagonists’ motivations and actions (they are absolutely in the right, by the way), I kept coming back to the same refrain: What can I learn from this about making change in a world of distant, self-righteous oligarchs who claim that upholding their dogmatic system is in our best interests?
Depending on how flexible an receptive I am at any given time, this could theoretically be done with anything from Good Night Moon to Marx’s Capital. Or, Capital Volume I, anyway. It's just reading and asking, “How can I apply this text, for better or worse, to my day to day life? How can it challenge my values? How does it inspire me to stick to my commitments and routines?”
Yes, by doing this I end up reading way too far into things. But this differs from having a reactive, parasocial connection to a work or it's creators. It's not saying “There's only one way that you’re supposed to interpret this book, and if you say something counter to canon, or even just against my personal preferences, then I’m gonna write a lengthy Reddit tirade! For the fandom!” Instead, it's trying to look at something with as much responsibility and going, “Sure this book made me feel a certain way. But I'm going to choose how I'm going to let it affect me in the long run.”
This means asking myself: how can the best book, the worst book, the longest book, a book for children, or a book for professionals in a league completely unrelated to my own, help me become better? A better dad, a better writer, a better partner, a more fit and mobile and attentive person?
My takeaway is: try. Show up if possible, if it doesn't hurt too much, and only if it's worthy of commitment. Try finding ways to apply things from those experiences in satisfying way. If it causes that sense of anxiety and dread, then do the work first to get the tools to handle it and try again.
Whether you like it or not, everyone (yes, everyone) is trying to be what they believe to be a good person every day. We are all trying to have a life with more beauty in it.
Even you.
