They say you become who you hang out with. I can vouch for that.
Here is my story of how I went from being an ignorant, gossip loving, time wasting, depressed, consumption driven bimbo, to a knowledge loving human being.
It all started with being raised by dumb parents.
Now with dumb, I mean those that actively seek to avoid learning, who fear the pursuit of knowledge, who live by the concept of ignorance being bliss and who simply value other things that elevating the mind. Our parents didn't encourage us to expand our minds but instead all attention and nagging went towards getting good grades, a good job, money and big stuff.
Well, I did all that, so did my brothers. Albeit none of us came out of it any wiser or happier, we just looked normal enough.
But it hit me like a brick as I approached my thirties that I was dumb.
I didnt know how things worked. I didnt understand basic laws of universe.
I didnt know history. I didnt know where stuff came from, how they were build and how they related to other stuff. I didnt know math beyond the numbers I typed in the calculator and I sure as hell didnt know what I was doing with myself with this gift called Life.
So one day I started to develop an allergic reaction to dumb. I couldn’t watch tv anymore, I couldn’t engage in mindless social gathering, it actually made me exhausted. So I did what my body and mind had begged for, I sat down and picked up a book. For 3 yrs, nearly every single weekend, from morning to night, I was reading.
I read everything that an ignorant mind could be starving for, which was alot. History, Politics, Economics, Math, Psychology, Business, Finance, Chemistry, Biology, Astronomy, Physics and Computer Science were some of the categories. The more I read, the more I realised how little I knew and how much more I wanted to learn.
Time passed, the reading list kept growing and the social circle kept shrinking.
It was scary at first. Here I went from being an insecure people pleaser, jumping to every opportunity for a hang out to consistantly saying NO. When asked the usual response would be: “It’s the weekend, im off from work, I don’t want to leave my house. I just wanna read and shut up”.
People thought I had gone nuts, isolated in the apartment doing “nothing with my life”. I used to ask my husband-what if I become totally asocial, have no friends and just read all the time??!
He laughed.
Today I laugh too.
Today I am a business owner, a soon-to-be programmer, a knowledge junkie, a lifetime student of self-learning and the wealthiest I have ever been, in happiness and in financial wealth.
Books are the gift of knowledge,given by those who were moved to share theirs and received by those moved to raise theirs.
Writing and reading is the never ending love affair of knowledge praising humans. It is the medium by which we collectively raise our consciousness.
An uninformed mind is a unempowered mind. For me the medicine for dumbness was to ditch the meaningless interactions and to hang with books more often.
What is your experience, how has reading helped you?