Spring and Tulips seem to go hand in hand don't they? I had just snapped this pic, when I wandered over to Mater's blog and saw more beautiful tulips twisting in a vase, like dancers stretching their limbs.
My tulips are up on a high shelf, the top of a bookcase really, and they are stretching downward toward the light and also toward me. As I lie in bed it seems like they are beaming at me with smiling faces, and they vaguely remind me of some happy memory from one of the Oz books I read as a child.. This is what I love best about tulips, how they appear so upright and formal, but given the opportunity they twist and dance, unfold, and eventually, if one is lucky, open up in rich exuberant abandon, in one last flush before the end. We should all age so well, with such life.
The tulips are a reminder of spring and promise and good things, because although I am improving, sometimes it seems that progress is harder to bear than the the lack thereof. Before, moving at all was such a struggle, that I was content to be perfectly still, content to be without pain. Now, I can actually get up and move around pretty well, but only for a very short time, a few minutes, far fewer than one culd count on the fingers of one hand. I leap up (well not quite) with joy and try to see how much I can do before I am jerked back down with pain, only to try it all again a short time later. I wonder if this is the way a dog on a chain feels, trying so hard to get at something desired, but always pulled back. It makes no sense, but it was easier when I could do nothing. I had no expectations so all I could do was hold on to what joy I could find. Now I want more.
Perhaps those same frustrations are echoed in my reading, in that I seem to be reading a lot, but at the same time I feel like I am getting nowhere. But of course this is different, although it is possible that a general sense of frustration pervades my attitudes, therefore influencing my mindset.
An article in last week's Washington Post however, has stuck in my mind and caused me to further ponder the root of my frustrations. The article discusses how reading on the internet seems to be affecting our attention span, our ability to read and focus on longer sentences or ideas, our ability to read and absorb ideas deeply. The point is that our brains are plastic and what we do affects how we gather, absorb, and store information. It occured to me that this reflects on my own lifelong struggle with reading the news vs reading books. I've always read the newspaper, more than one paper in fact, but I have, at different periods read them more or less thoroughly. I read fast, and I tend to skim, reading the headlines and the critical paragraphs of most articles, and only reading a few in depth. I go through periods where I pay more attention and periods where I pay less attention. The problem is that even when I pay more attention to the news and news magazines, I always feel like my brain is full of stuff (the world) and yet simultaneously empty of true knowledge. I feel like my thoughts are darting here and there searching for something tht is just out of reach. I feel like that dog on a chain, reaching for knowledge and yet abrubptly pulled back without gaining my objective.
With books the rewards seem greater: I might not know what is going on in Pakistan, or the Left Bank, or even the opposite side of my own town, but I feel like I learned something, I feel like I gain knowledge and understanding which affects my view of the world.
This sense of empty frustration is not new, I felt the same way pre-internet, when the only way to keep up with the news was to read physical newspapers. Now that I read most of my news online, and the article seems to confirm this suspicion, I feel even more empty headed, as if I absorbed more from the physical paper than from the online version. Perhaps I should go back to a physical subscription of one or two newspapers? Will I read them? Or will I just be accumulating more paper waste, for a very small gain in actual insight. Both the NY TImes and WSJ have online versions that are closer to the actual paper. Both versions also have kindle versions, where I can simply read the articles linearly, one right after the other. Will I focus more on the kindle than on my computer screen? What is the cost vs reward ration here?
Or is it better to read the news online and then read one or two magazines in their paper form? I like reading The Economist and will usually read it cover to cover. The Atlantic and the New Yorker also rate highly on my "likely to read" scale. Perhaps I need to set aside a focused time just for news and internet stories, say an hour or two a day of reading with my morning coffee. Last year, I set aside one day a week as "unplugged", and doing so did wonders for my mental well-being, although I've recently abandoned it. Perhaps I need to reserve some slow time as well, time to read something that requires attention, something that creates its own space in the brain. I seem to be more suited to depth, I don't want to lose that ability.
