With what feels like an ambitious goal of reading 65 books in 2025 (and books read to the small grandkids don't count), the question occurred to me, Why do I read? Is it because reading was an integral part of my upbringing? Because I have some thirst for knowledge? To have my horizons expanded and my mind stretched? To be transported to exotic places far away from Minnesota winters? Or perhaps all of the above.
Certainly reading was the norm in my childhood home. We had plenty of books around and were encouraged to read often -- although I do recall my sister Kathy and I being admonished to look outside and stop reading during car trips. Books took me beyond my Indianapolis neighborhood and all that was familiar. The Childcraft series (a subset of World Book Encyclopedia) was my classroom for knowing inventors, explorers, and pioneers. The Hardy Boys and Tom Swift lived lives or adventure and mystery with their good friends. In later years Richard Baxter, John Stott, and J I Packer led me to explore truths about faith and God in ways that went beyond what I could experience in my local church. The poetry of Mary Oliver has forged an even deeper awareness and appreciation for the natural world around me than I have seen with my own observations. Reading and books have enriched my life beyond what I can even imagine!
Yet for me, there is a danger in reading. That is, just because I have read something, or learned something from a book, doesn't mean that I actually "know" the thing. In Jordan Peterson's Maps of Meaning, he recognized that:
"All the things I 'believed' were things I thought sounded good, admirable, respectable, courageous. They weren't my things, however--I had stolen [borrowed?] them. Most of them I had taken from books. Having 'understood' them, abstractly, I presumed I had a right to them--presumed I could adopt them, as if they were mine: presumed that they were me. My head was stuffed full of the ideas of others; stuffed full of arguments that I could not logically refute. I did not know then that an irrefutable argument is not necessarily true, nor that the right to identify with certain ideas has to be earned." (p. xvii) Perhaps another way of expressing Peterson's observation is "wishing/wanting doesn't make it so."
The purpose of this blog has been to help me to find authenticity in thought, action, and living. For me, a part of living authentically is to differentiate between thoughts, ideas, priorities, and beliefs that are "logically irrefutable", but belong to others, and those that I can legitimately own--that are me. In this coming year as I interact with fresh and unfamiliar ideas, theories, and concepts, I expect to be challenged and to learn. Different perspectives. Unknown (to me) ways of looking at the world. New fields of thought. Plenty of words to look up!
I want to carefully sift all that I take in. I want to remain openminded, yet firmly grounded. I want to keep in the forefront of my mind the words of the Apostle Paul: "whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is commendable, if there is any excellence, if there is anything worthy of praise, think about these things." (Philippians 4:8)
Now, where is that book?
