Reading Big In a Tiny Book
Rid your fingers off the scrolling habit
The decision to cut down on time spent on social media comes with a very glaring question and the answer to which is not always obvious or straightforward. The question being, if I give up my incessant scrolling habit on Facebook and Instagram, never mind the service that contains cess pool of opinions including one of the supposed most powerful man in the world, what should I do with the time I have on my mind. Again, the answer to which varies for each individual and few are pretty adept at putting that free time to good and effective use. In my quest to quit distractions of social media though, I came across an effective method called Digital Minimalism, which gave me effective set of guidelines to quit the distraction and lead a more disciplined and productive lifestyle. As I set about implementing Digital Minimalism in my life, the first few attempts were futile and I jumped back to my old distractions. I quickly realized, giving up social media is not the hardest thing but putting that free time to any sort of good use is the utmost tough job.
Here I started researching, might I add, inwards and outwards, for activities that will put this newly found free time to effective use. I dug deep into my drawer full of habits I had locked away to find if anything I can restart or kick it off which might be productive to my current lifestyle. I dusted off this blog and rewired it to start posting again. Pulled out old books from the shelf which were incompletely read and decided to read them from cover to cover. The good thing about habit is that as easy as it is to dive into bad ones, it’s even easier to surf through the good ones especially if you suddenly find your passion reignited for it. The digital world of Instagram, Facebook and Twitter still went on uninterrupted without me and were only getting my attention during commute and breaks that I enjoyed while at work. As ironical as it may sound, during one of these breaks that I came across this cute little idea about mobile phone sized reading material. It surely caught my attention, more so to the title that the article mentioned -
The idea that you can carry a phone sized book with you everywhere and instead of picking up your phone during your breaks and/or commutes, pick up the book to read some interesting material on varied subjects ranging from current topics to old English Literature.
I understand that this may not be for everyone as not everyone wants to read literature in their free time or even read at all. The take away here being, we can and should put our free time to our own benefits than being a consumer of attention economy where it not only harms our mental health but also gives nothing in return.
I have never been part of any kind of book club. As soon as I came across this neat little idea, I subscribed to their book club. I selected for their 3 themed books to be delivered to me 4 times a year. Each of these deliveries neatly curated and designed by the folks at The Mouse Book Club and packaged in an easy on-the-go readable format. The editors curate from a long list of literature, short stories, poetries, speeches etc and structure them around a theme that is varied and challenging.
The delivery did take a while due to this ongoing pandemic. As we all know there is no commute or travel to enjoy these pocket sized adventures but I thoroughly enjoy these during my frequent breaks that I take while working from home.
I intend to write more about each one of these, that is if I can grasp them enough to write about them. The kind of challenge I always look forward to, resting my thumbs of the scrolling, thereby, Turning the Page.
