Vertically Challenged, Mentally Levitated
Confessions of a slow reader
I woke up with such vigour early in the morning that my neck refused to submit to the flashing neural signals resulting in a mild shooting pain through my upper back. It was as if my vertebrae unionized overnight and was staging a protest against verticality. Well, I had vowed to let not these petty things influence my desires for a levitated mind. So I soldiered through my morning regimen, the mutiny be damned.
Among the many rituals I subject myself to in the name of mental levitation, reading speed and comprehension stands out as an amigo and adversary. I consider myself a slow reader (240 words per minute for full comprehension), which according to the internet puts me at a reading speed of a very distracted 12-year old with an early onset of cataract.
I have also noticed that my mind loves to go only fast enough to make sure each sentence is fully recognized and appreciated for what it is doing. It’s almost like each sentence sashays down a ramp, turns here, and there, swirls around, looks at me in an enticing manner, and sashays back—all in an effort to impress me. If I even glance at the next sentence without the previous one having made “total” sense, I feel like I have betrayed some unwritten moral obligation and then dissolve into a state of mini-panic.
Years of mastering this flawed technique turned me into a tortoise with a PhD in sentence worship. Such slowness satisfies my desire for increased clarity and illumination of each sentence. But this gives way to a cyclic causality where slow reading gives a glimmer of increased comprehension, which in turn makes me want to read even slower for an even greater understanding. The myth I believe is that the slower I read, the better I will understand.
On the contrary, my guess is that my mind is like a fat lazy cat stretching and luxuriating in the sun. It does not want to be pushed to do the work at hand—read and process faster. This laziness allows my mind to s-l-o-w-l-y ease into each sentence, when it could have been pushed to do the work of reading fast, editing concept formations and imagination, and encoding it.
Thus ensues the classic internal tug of war documented in the Bible. What I want to do I do not, and what I do not, that I do. I want to read faster but I fear I wouldn’t understand. And so I read slowly at a pace where I reach Pg 3 of War and Peace in 2029.
Whether this is a middle age crisis or spiritual sabotage, I intend to find out. I am in this for the long haul. So stay tuned!