You should read more. And you should truly read. To truly read is to read with empathy. That’s the mind’s magic potion. Please, take a drink.
The first effect of this potion is an expanded vocabulary. If done with empathy and consideration, it can change the way you think about yourself and the world around you.
Reading expands your vocabulary, whether it’s through fiction, nonfiction or all the different genres in between. Think of our bodies and brains as big, fleshy computers. We store and process data so we can make decisions and act on them later. When you read a book, you’re providing more data for your “computer” to process and sort through. If you pick up a book and flip through its pages, you may find some unfamiliar words. When you pair the learning process with a curiosity to learn what those words mean, you have then added at least one new word to your vocabulary. And this can happen each and every time you read. Adding new words to your vocabulary helps you express yourself in ways you may not have been able to before.
When you truly read, it’s not a simple information pipeline between the author and the reader. It is a sharing of ideas between one person to another. Finding out a little bit about the author whose work you are reading can help you accomplish this “true reading.” Learning about who the author is humanizes them and gives you someone to connect the ideas to. Maybe you find out the context in which they wrote the piece, or why. This gives you further insight into what this other person is trying to communicate to you and why they are communicating it.
The magic potion helps us to think of the pages of a book as not just a collection of words, but another human being’s ideas. Ideas which they worked hard to craft and develop. If we can truly read, then we can potentially change the way we think by practicing a sense of open-mindedness—which allows us to appreciate others’ ideas. When we open ourselves up to appreciating other’s ideas, we learn more about ourselves and the world around us.
Now, this all sounds great in theory. But how do you, a busy college student, faculty member or whoever is reading this column, apply it to your life? How can you craft the magic potion and drink it? My main prescription would be to set some time within your daily rituals to read. It doesn’t have to be long, maybe a paragraph or a page if you’re feeling ambitious, but read truly and with intent to understand our shared humanity. It will change the way you see the words on the page. Those words will no longer be just black ink, but now ideas with humanity and empathy attached to them.
