Reading Dopamine and My Joie de Vivre!
The first time, when I fell for a story, it was when my youngest aunt was feeding me and narrating a story. I must have been about four or three years old, back then!? In India, it is common to see kids being fed till they turn 6 years. I don’t remember the story she narrated for me. But, I do remember the impression of how she made it so interesting and captivating! Since then, whenever someone in the family or outside told a story, I would listen in avidly.
My life is an incredible journey occasionally when I look back at it! As its traveler, I am never weary of the long stretching path ahead of me, even if it does not go well, all the time. A few might say that you need someone to accompany you in this life’s journey. A fellow traveler in this stretch with no destination at sight. For me the short snippet of moments with people and their stories have been my companions almost all my life so far.
A narrator is that invisible person who like a true companion spins a tale that sets your tail of curiosity on fire that keeps wagging like the excited puppy. With the light from the fire charring tail, I watch the path become clearer for me. Interestingly, stories capture one’s imagination and hold the listener as a willing captive. There are innumerable incidents were people have even forgotten themselves in a story.
A Voluntary Intoxication
Sometimes, if not for these books that I have read and traveled with as companions, I might not have an identity of my own. A Karmic Scent or Vasana of my passion and attraction seem keenly set in this lifetime at least, to be books and stories. More so in the people who tell me those stories. I read anything that picks my quirky taste in life and its human incidences. But then, the choice to read happened when lacking companionship in childhood led me magically to seek books for companion.
Reading books are my dopamine and getting high on those borrowed lives’ pinnacle moments meant real-life can be momentarily suspended in a frozen tabloid while the imagination of the narrator takes its form in my dreamscape. These escapades into the other worldly imagination became the real living places for me.
Danger of Both Worlds Matching Up
Some writers are so accurate, that they recreate a world so close to the real world! I have sometimes been in the world unable to come back to the real and dull life. The people in the books that I read are real and real people are just shadows of my mind. That kind of reading could be quite interesting, but you need to have an anchor as backup to bring you down to the real world. Almost an electrical earthing to withstand overload on the main raison d’être!
Some recreated worlds are incredible especially from the fantasy genre, it is almost like the movies made from books almost caught up in the dream of life itself. The dreams reeks of the known and unknown commingling that often I get caught in their splendour and shine. It is like living a borrowed life in surrogacy of stolen moments.
Dreaming of World Literature
The world is changing rapidly, yet not all stories are told. The stories are different for each century, when each age, time, space, and clocked decades decide the tenor of the writing. I wish the world would be open to read banned books too. Sometimes, having a 360o + 5o degree of peripheral view of our world, our human emotions, and our growing understandings take away the vital aspect of not being able to view the outcomes with dispassion.
I wish I could read books from all around the world preferably in their original language. I may have self-taught languages, but it does not compare to actual classroom learning. Yet, I never failed to soak myself in channels where I can be among languages and its essential nature of being so close to human expressions.
Choice or No Choice | a Writer or a Reader?!!!
This choice of being a writer or a reader of writings have been with me for such long time that I despise being forced to choose. I am still aspiring to raise above my mediocre writing so much that I don’t mind making it my life’s goal.
Sometimes, it is just total fascination while reading better writers than me. The innumerable short stories and my failed NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month that comes in November each year) ‘s of the past tells me that novel writing might be a long way off for me!
This passion that I have for reading, sometime, forces the stifled person in me to write and the horror of that fact is the unwillingness in me to re-write, until it is done! I sit on my laurels of being a proud creator. In that state I almost reek of narcissism. That is when a failed writing project always pushes me back to reading my favourite novelists and authors.
Reading Dopamine and My Joie de Vivre!
When oral stories replaced the printed ones, it might be a mystery to me. But I was led on to various books sometimes by my personal choice and sometimes by compulsion. They gave me joy and a sense of a heart beating human being. The truth was not black or white anymore for me.
I found there can be 50 shades of greys in the truth on ethical matters. Then naturally, it is harder still to have a clear decision on issues of human fallacies and faulty inferences. In these moments of my indecisiveness lies the variant of being a human or a monster of the situation.
Yet, the trails of reliving the life of another in a world created from World Principles means that you have experienced something out of the ordinary for a dewdrop of a human lifetime. The joy of having been the hero or the anti-hero of the moment while escaping and challenging the dryad life present in the noble quest of life. That according to me, is an incredible joyful event in my reading life.
Flower of Understanding Blooms from Reading Experience
When the experience even momentarily had of the main lead role’s life challenge and be part of their victory or defeat over it, that gives the reader a new understanding. This understanding then, is the flower that blooms in me, when I read a story. The flower, not only makes understanding humans more important; but also, results in the growth of humanity within the reader.
There are many ways to tell a tale of the life and which one we choose would result in our empathies towards the outcome, or the person involved. Moving tales in digital media seem to follow similar shades of grey. While being able to find a proper means to evaluate and pass a verdict on, and for conforming to that truth is still just one shade of grey only!
My Understanding and Its Growth
Until into my freshman year, I was reading only for the pleasure of reading and experimenting with writing occasionally. But I found my writing lacked much character and finesse that I prefer to read more.
With each reading the old self undergoes a lot of changes and so does my understandings of the world undergo changes. The happiness that we as humanity chase and pursue are within us and reachable just need to find what is the passion light that fires up our tail of curiosity within each one of us! I wish you a happy journey of self-discovery!
External LInk
Itinerant Storyteller 