Cynthia Boris

Summer has finally arrived in Southern California and that means temps well over 100 in some spots. I ran out to the store this weekend and I could hardly breath between the heat and the bad air. I immediately thought about my son, out driving in his truck and I had this awful parent moment where I saw him overheating on the freeway!

Just last month, when it wasn’t anywhere near this hot, he and a friend got stuck in Los Angeles when the car they were driving over heated. They were in a terrible neighborhood and he was hours from home, late at night. It was a nightmare.

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I was born a reader. I read fiction books and biographies, history books and books about movies and how to books, poetry and scripts.

I still read. But now it’s webpages and emails and Twitter threads and Facebook updates.

If I collected every word I read in day and put it on a piece of paper, I’d probably find that I read the equivalent of a novel, every day. But they’re scattered words.

I don’t like that. I feel like I’ve lost something – my creative edge – my brains. I feel like I used to be smarter.

I started reading a book called Off the Grid, which I agreed to review for Globalshift.org, so it was more of an obligation read than a fun read. Three pages in and I’m hooked. It’s a fascinating look at what it takes to live outside of a community with water and power and 9-5 jobs. The author references Thoreau’s Walden and I remembered reading that book in college and studying the whole Walden Pond movement, which was somewhat akin to the hippie commune concept of the sixties.

It reminded me of Los Alamos phase a few years ago where I read everything written on Oppenheimer and the bomb. I miss being that invested in a subject.

Thoreau said, ‘How vain it is to sit down to write when you have not stood up to live.’

I think this is why I haven’t written any good fiction lately. Because I’ve stopped learning and stopped living. Though I did learn how to move a database, but I don’t know that that really counts.

I’m going to read more. Books.

Articles of the Week:

The Clean-Slate Guide – a fascinating, counter-intuitive way to clear clutter.
Why I’m Cutting Back on Multi-Tasking - the title says it and it’s a lesson I need to learn.