An Ode to Words
Ever since I can remember, I’ve had a fascination with words. More than just a collection of characters that come together to form sounds connected with preconceived meanings, but as a medium that can birth emotion, love, hatred, passion, anger, and excitement.
There’s a difference between simply thinking something is cool and being absolutely blown away by it. And I find that in our world of flashy animations and special FXs there’s a heck of a lot of coolness going around, and not enough blowing people away. Eloquently piecing the perfect words together to generate a desired reaction or feeling is simply too much work nowadays, and a quick “that’s cool” seems to be a happy compromise.
Don’t get me wrong—I’m all for using photographs and videos to tell a story (and I wouldn’t be an aspiring photographer if I wasn’t). I just admire those that can tell the same story with words that captivate me enough to make me forget I wasn’t actually there.
Joseph Rudyard Kipling said that “words are, of course, the most powerful drug used by mankind”, and I tend to agree with him. Because as much as I love writing words, I love reading them more.
And while words can stir me up wherever I may be, there is a metaphorical illustration that comes to mind of the ideal place to read for long periods of time.
Maybe it goes back to my childhood: spending the cold and howling winter night inside, sitting around a fire. I’d sit for hours in a navy-blue beanbag chair with a hot cocoa close at hand, reading book after book while acoustic music played softly in the background. In fact, it’s in that same atmosphere that I’m writing these words now: in the same beanbag chair around the same fireplace, albeit a slightly different taste in music.
While books still hold a special place in my heart, the majority of my reading these days is done through an RSS feed reader. No fireplace and no beanbag chair, just music and a toasty warm MacBook Pro…
And so, I longed to replicate my anecdotal reading paradise digitally. And I have done just that.
Part of the inspiration that sparked this post came from a question posed by Sam Brown last week, asking how you read your RSS feeds—through a feed reader or a browser?
Sifting through the comments, I was shocked to find that so many people treat their feed reader like their inbox—an overwhelming blob of information that they must constantly make a conscious effort to tend to and bring down to zero. Maybe it’s so foreign to me because I actually enjoy my RSS reading sessions and *gasp* look forward to them.
Your feed reader should not be like your inbox. You cannot pick and choose what will come into your inbox, and you can’t choose whether or not you want to reply to a particular message (unless, of course, you don’t mind making the other party upset and/or losing your job).
My feed reader isn’t like that. It’s mine—in the most selfish and sacred way possible.
Look at the upper right of your keyboard. You see that big “DELETE” button? Yeah, that’s your feed reader’s best friend. Anything that you don’t enjoy reading gets deleted. Anything that you find yourself dreading to read gets deleted. While we’re at it, anything that doesn’t utterly excite you should get put out with the trash as well. Make your feed reader into a sanctuary that you can retreat to engulf yourself in. It’s like the beanbag/fireplace analogy from before, but in a library. A big library. Of only the books that you absolutely love and never grow weary of reading.
Maybe you’ve forgotten the absolute euphoria of turning twitter off and read something mindblowingly brilliant, uninterrupted for 30 minutes straight. Or worse: maybe you’ve never experienced that firelit reading feeling before. The truth is, if you’re not eagerly anticipating opening your feed reader every night and enveloping yourself in words, you’re doing it wrong.
Just as a camera in the hands of a photographer can create heart-wrenching stories, words in the hands of a wordsmith can provoke, challenge, and inspire us in unimaginable ways.
If only we’d take the time to stop skimming.
