Slow Digestion
As I read a chapter called “Deep Reading” I grow more aware that when I talk about deep reading or deep dialoging it's not about "deepness." While it successfully expresses wanting something different, it's very vague. It just sort of points to something better. But try deep reading or deep discussing. What do you do? How? What would you do differently compared to how you currently read or converse.
I'm realizing when I say deep I'm just wanting time. I want to slow down. I want to not rush though books. Words whizzing past my eyes. I used to think if I was reading and not taking notes, I wasn't really reading. I don't need to go that far. I just want to go slower and soak it in.
The same is true with digesting my reading. I want to think through the reading. Really think it all the way through. That takes time. We have to pursue a line of thinking, come up with 7 new lines then pursue some of those to some extent, then come back to where we got sidetracked from and then maybe pull in some of the loveliness from those side tracks. We have to embrace silence and just let it sit there knowing the conversation is still happening. It's not out loud but our minds are still lit up. (In her book Reader Come Home with the chapter, Deep Reading, Marianne Wolf points out research that our brains are actually lit up all over the place.)
We also have to embrace the “Third Third” of a conversation. The Third Third is a concept I learned in Tim Hurson’s book Think Better. The good ideas in a brainstorm, in his experience, came in the last third of the brainstorm. The first third was all the usual stuff. The second third was weird or wild and then stagnant. Just nothing. There's nothing else to possibly come up with. You're hopeless. No chance we're coming up with another idea. We're all out. Done. Kaput. And then. The good stuff arrives.
Good ideas, and good conversation and good digestion, all take time.
"So take your time then," a part of me yells out to the rest of me. Stop with all this vague talk of “deep” this and “deep” that. Just go slow. Take your time. You're making it harder than it needs to be it tells me.
I often think if I had a bunch of money I’d just take my time. Leave the rushing behind. Reading this you might think, leave NYC then. That'll cure you of rushing. And that's fair. There are times when it seems like the city crushes not just the proverbial dreams but lots of life into an absurdly small spacetime.
But the truth is, assume lots of money, in the burbs or on a farm in the Hudson Valley (so I can still get to the city when I like) and plenty of time reading and talking about reading and I'll still rush. It's a me problem. No amount of money or time or deepness is going to save me from myself. As I like to quote often, "wherever you go there you are."
While it is still true that I want to sell readers on booking time to digest what they read, to cultivate and practice in a specific kind of conversation, in the meantime I can slow my roll. At all times, I can take a beat. I can read fewer books at a time. Take a chill pill and then have a long, non-time bound conversation with a friend. Now if we could just figure out how to read the same books and finish them around the same time...
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Reach out to me just for fun! - tommy@extragrad.com