Random thoughts on relaxation, the mind and books!

My favorite picture of a simple relaxation is one in which I am reading while munching on a doughnut and sipping on a glass of milk.
I love the doughnut shape because I find it convenient to playfully hook my fingers in the middle while brooding on the content of my reading material. Milk helps with softening the effect that would result from the by-product of eating too much doughnuts; oil. My days of forming a close bond with this drink dates back to my boarding school days and I have since stayed true. I don’t even flirt with coffee or other brews. My consumption of milk continues to grow heavier. Last month, June, saw me tearing open two 400g net weight of the powdery stuff.

My love for reading was one of love at first sight. As soon as I learnt to spell and make sense out of a sentence, it became a big hit with me. Books have been faithful companions: speaking to me in periods of loneliness, telling me stories, empowering my expression by giving me more than one way to see and articulate a thought, educating me in privacy outside the confines of a classroom and above all, helping me to think!

It was even more exciting when I realized that the beautiful minds that the world has ever celebrated all had reading as a common indulgence. It nourished their imaginations to a heightened fertility and creativity.

I remember a restless young man, Azuka Eboka Obi, from my secondary school days. He was a slavish reader. I have seen him curl up with a book on weekends for hours at a time. He wouldn’t go to church because, well, he had more exciting stories to read. He performed poorly in class work, except in English Language and the arts and some science subjects requiring more practical skills. He read for pleasure: magazines, novels etc Books were for him pretty much an escapist mechanism. He couldn’t deal with the abstraction that came with other subjects. They were too much for his entertainment hungry mind to handle.
At a point, he fell a class behind us, but no one including the teachers could call him a failure. He just had his focus and priority mixed is what everyone thought.

Forever restless, he was never satisfied to leave things as they were. He would tear them apart and modify them. We saw him melt our plastic buckets many times to make blades for battery operated fans, turn a can to a crude pressing iron heated by burning coals, water heater constructed from metal hangers etc
Once we entered the dormitory and were greeted with sounds that seemed like those in a cinema. What had changed?
He had rigged up a palm size hand held computer game to huge speakers and the sounds got incredibly amplified. There was no telling what this dude would come up with next. He quickly got bored with his last achievement.

To be sure, I don’t think Azuka learnt his inventions from following any manual instructions but he had developed an expanded mind from reading. In his reading, he was able to SEE that he could do more. The last project I recall him getting into was writing a novel with a dizzying plot. He wrote the story in this notebook that was worn from frequent handling. I asked to read his draft but he said no. A private individual was Azuka.

Now I wouldn’t observe Azuka so closely except I had an interest in this way of life myself. But I had a big problem with concentration until just recently. I suffered terribly from a mind that would disconnect without my awareness. For this reason, my pace was so sluggish that I started to get discouraged. It would take forever to finish books just over a hundred pages long. So I built a huge complex for any book that was fat or thick. Once I ploughed through the book, Honey Badger, which was over 600 pages long.
It was exhausting but I did it. From that experience I started to link to the clue that would reveal the solution to my breaking attention.

This situation became even more worrisome when my magazine subscriptions would pile up unread because I was still stuck with the back editions. When also I would find interesting themed books with friends or at bookstands but get intimidated by the size.
So in desperation I cried to God for help with this problem. He did by showing me that I was only interested in the high points and discriminatory to the low points where a story forms! The high and the lows are all connected and to choose one over the other would break the picture. My mind couldn’t deal with those broken pictures so it would drift.

So my solution to this was visualization. Seeing a picture as opposed to seeing parts, seeing meaning as opposed to seeing words, then holding to it and stretching it as the story expands.
This is my silver bullet. It starts out with a slow pace because the beginning is a detailed search but once the mind gets the hang of things it starts to push faster. Accelerating so fast making pages fly!