How Reading Affects You and Your Worldview

Soul-shaping Reading Can Cure What Ails You

Until the present becomes the past, you and I cannot analyze what is happening around us now. The present is like a picture being painted or a puzzle without edges. Until any situation has a frame, you and I cannot interpret meaning.

A chapter in a book I’m reading now began with a quote from a poem. I stopped reading the book to look up that poem.

Curious title. “Have You Ever Tried to Enter the Long Black Branches?”

Well, what’s that about? I wondered.

In my journal, I wrote down these lines from the poem that led me to think, not about nature, as the writer intended. I began thinking about how reading itself nourishes the soul.

“Have you ever tried to enter the long black branches of other lives? . . .

. . . Do you think this world was only an entertainment for you?

. . . No wonder we hear, in your mournful voice, the complaint/ that something is missing from your life!

. . . Well, there is time left––fields everywhere invite you into them.

And who will care, who will chide you if you wander away/ from wherever you are to look for your soul? . . .”

Mary Oliver, “Have You Ever Tried to Enter the Long Black Branches?” [1]

Sentences in books––ideas in books––can lift off the page with enough force to change how you and I think or feel. Or how you and I see ourselves inside the world we inhabit.

From an Old Journal Entry

Twenty minutes later, his dad found him sitting on the floor, reading from a children’s Bible about God telling Abraham to sacrifice his son Isaac.

With a look of deep concern, my grandson asked, “Did you know about this? Does Mom know?”

---

This pajama-clad boy had fallen into the world of books. Reading and thinking and processing what he read, instinctively, he wondered how these written words might apply to him.

In Mary Oliver’s poem, the sentence “And who will care, who will chide you if you wander away from wherever you are to look for your soul?” made me pause to consider these words, reminding me that my soul needs care.

Pay Attention to Your Life

The challenge reading presents is to pay attention. To ourselves. To others. To our surroundings. To look around. To look beyond.

Instead of viewing media, which does much of the thinking for us and little to nourish our souls, reading requires decoding messages. First the letters, then the words, then words combined to make sentences and paragraphs.

Ideas in their purest form come from reading. The brain works to transfer ideas and thoughts from a written page, expanding rather than shrinking our capacity to imagine.

Reading not only takes us places, reading can help us find our way home.

Words matter because words shape our thinking. And thinking shapes our souls. And our souls need input the way our bodies need fuel.

“Your beliefs become your thoughts, 

Your thoughts become your words, 

Your words become your actions, 

Your actions become your habits, 

Your habits become your values, 

Your values become your destiny.”

––Ghandi

Without words to describe what is seen, heard, and felt, we could not communicate within ourselves, much less communicate with other people.

Discoveries from Without and Within

Among the most important words we hear each day are those words we say to ourself.

Author Marilynne Robinson continues to live by the advice one of her early schoolteachers gave.

“You must make one’s mind a good companion, because you live with it every moment of your life.”

Keep good company. And the company of books is as important to our welfare as the company of friends and companions.

We read to know we are not alone.

A writer shares what’s on his or her mind as if to carry on a conversation.

Conversation enables readers to relate to someone else’s story, experience, or point of view.

The territory between reader and writer stretches and contracts, making it possible for readers to change their minds, or to reinforce beliefs, or perhaps discover a whole new way of seeing things.

The Wonderful World of Books

While consciously you may not read in order to change your mind or mend your ways, reading does things to your brain that create pathways of response.

Actually, we don’t know anything until we have acquired for ourselves information to nourish our minds or our souls, any more than our body can benefit from pictures of a meal we haven’t eaten or recipes seen in a cookbook.

Taking time to read is as important for the mind as exercise is for the body. Francine Prose recommends reading slowly, savoring what you read, which “may let you see reading as something that might move or delight you.”

My own books are filled with underlined sentences, phrases, quotes. Sometimes whole paragraphs get marked, guiding me back to whatever got my attention in the first place.

Words make sound whether I hear them spoken aloud or only in my head.

For some reason, words can resonate.

Resonance. A quality evoking a response.

“Books don’t change people; paragraphs do. Sometimes even sentences.”

John Piper

The process of underlining something in a book reinforces impact of the words and the ideas words represent. Words open doors to understanding, and thinking about those words helps unlock their meaning.

Whether reading the Bible, or poetry, or fiction, or self-help or non-fiction to gain information, only the tiniest bit of what we read actually stays with us for long.

In that moment and then later, when whatever forces at work in the universe, you find yourself reading a book again, it’s like meeting an old friend.

What we focus on determines what we become.

“Little by little the landscape changes because of the people we admire.”

quote from the movie Hud

Reading stimulates brain receptors, and increases our capacity to learn and grow, and later recall what we read.

Reading affects the mind the way music affects feeling.

Because words represent thoughts and ideas, how you and I respond to words will form the shape of our character and our capacity for empathy.

empathy––the feeling that you understand and share another person’s experiences and emotions: the ability to share someone else’s feelings

Every sentence that takes you as a reader to the long black branches of other lives engages your mind, stimulates thought, and can in the process enlarge your soul.

And this takes me back to the poem where I started. A kind of story footnote.

Mary Oliver’s poem ends with these words.

“I climb. I backtrack.

I float.

I ramble my way home.”

[1] https://apoemaday.tumblr.com/post/178286230636/have-you-ever-tried-to-enter-the-long-black

[2] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/39934.Reading_Like_a_Writer