Life is Sailing

Too long has it been since I sat down and read a book intentionally for more than ten minutes. So this afternoon, I chose to lay across my bed and read for a dedicated thirty minutes. I told my boys it was time for them to read a book too. The rooms grew decently quiet and somewhat still. It was beautiful. The characters brought people into my life from the early 1900s. I walked with adventurers and innovators, youth and mature.

But then a strange thing started to happen. After about twenty minutes, my mind, so eager to invest in this delicious past time, became quite weary. My eyelids began to droop. My friends on the pages were sluggishly trailing behind and disconnecting as I found myself reading the same sentence three times, trying to focus. It would seem that reading actually relaxed me, and here I was now drifting into a very pleasant state of drowsiness. Maybe it was the excessive heat outside (the “real feel” temperature today was 114 degrees!). Maybe it was running around taking my children to all of their camps and activities. Perhaps in reading a book, I slowed down life enough which allowed my mind to tell my body to relax and take a breather, i.e. a nap. Sometimes perhaps to read a book… is to take a nap.