Slow Reading

All my life, I have needed to be told to hurry up. I seem to work, study, move, make decisions, and write slower than everyone else. It's not in my nature to rush, and when I have to, I am usually pretty miserable (except maybe when I am getting to travel). Even when I googled “slow reading,” the first related question to come up was “What is slow reading a symptom of?”

Last year I read The Life We're Looking For by Andy Crouch. In it, he talks about the effects of technology on our lives and relationships. One idea was “three miles an hour.” Up until the invention of the train and then the motorcar, life was lived at three miles per hour—the average speed a person walks. Technology has brought many benefits, but the increased speed at which the world moves has its downsides. At three miles per hour, there is time for deep thought, contemplation, boredom, and reflection. There is a different kind of space for ideas to take root and for new off-shoots to sprout up and for growth to occur.

Creating that kind of space requires intentionality. When it comes to reading, the list of books I want to read and the stacks piled on coffee tables and bookshelves keeps growing. I want to get to as many as I can as soon as I can. But thinking intentionally, I know that it doesn't matter how many books I read if I rush through them so much that I miss the beauty and the point of the book.

One way to approach this balance is through consistency and habit-building. In Atomic Habits, James Clear talks about making habits easy and using habit pairing. I'm an out-of-sight, out-of-mind kind of person, so making reading easy for me has included keeping a stack of books within reach and the kindle app on my phone. Habit pairing has looked like reading certain books at certain times of day. The habit of reading has gotten stronger as external cues reminding me of what I want to read have been built in more frequently.

My author for this year is Wendell Better and my goal sounded reasonable at the beginning of the year: one book by Berry per month. But I am finding it impossible to rush Berry—the tone, quality, and subject of his writing seems to forbid it. I am needing to figure out how to build in consistency in reading when it comes to his books, setting a time to slow down and read a short amount with room for breathing around it—the pace Berry's writing seems to take.

So this year, my intention with reading is to prioritize slower, more focused reading. Reading that moves at three miles per hour to absorb and really understand what I am reading, to let the ideas seep in and ferment.