A Series of Observations

The world is changing in unimaginable ways, and one of the worst ways is that we are reading less, that children are reading less.

What happens when the world stops reading?

A creator by the name of Warpaint Journal, originally sourced on Instagram, puts it perfectly.

“A generation of kids growing up without reading books isn’t just a generation that reads less – it’s a generation slowly losing the muscle for empathy. Because books aren’t just stories. They’re training grounds for imagination, for slipping into someone else’s life, someone else’s grief, joy, fear, or mess. They teach you to sit with feelings that aren’t yours. Without that, how do you learn to care about people who aren’t like you? How do you build a world where you pause before judging, listen before reacting, understand before dismissing?”

I couldn’t have said it better myself, and that will be our focus…just how quickly the world is changing; where books are closing, and minds are closing with them.

This isn’t about any particular genre either. There is no genre of book that is better or worse at what Warpaint Journal was talking about. ALL stories provide a journey that readers are invited to join, and on that journey is where we experience everything. Magic, hope, dreams, hate, confusion, criticism, and much more.

Every inch of humanity is laid out in those pages, no matter how much of a fantasy the world may be, and it is up to us to maintain that humanity. So that the changes that are happening can better serve us, or maybe so we can be better prepared for the changes we have no control over.

Either way, to shut out the experiences of others entirely, is to push away connection, community, conversation; and when we lack the emotional intelligence required to connect and conversate, how can we ever expect the world to think not only critically, but deeply?

I think most of all, it is terrifying to envision a world where children do not know the comfort of a good book. To think that an entire generation, and perhaps more, will long for what can be found within their pages.

In many ways, reading has been a lifeline for me, keeping me connected to myself, so that I never feel too far away, and certainly an opportunity to step away from my world when it is too hard to bear.

The greatest memories I have with loved ones are shared over stories. Around dinner tables, at bedtime, or on car rides, and many memories shared alone. Where I stayed up far too late on a school night simply because I had to know what happened next.

Those books were fuel for my imagination and taught me to dream bigger for myself. They taught me that the world can be unfair, far before I ever understood how. They taught me that magic really is everywhere, but that hard times are something even heroines must face.

Books have taught me to love, to hate, to be angry, to question the world, and to be fearless in my pursuit towards whatever comes next for me.

Books have connected me to people I otherwise might never have known, books have started conversations I will spend the rest of my life having.

I remember during the pandemic, I was full-time nannying for a family that had two beautiful, rambunctious, charismatic, and vibrant boys. At the beginning of the pandemic, they were five and ten, a big age gap between them, but what would always be the same was their capacity for curiosity.

I started reading the Percy Jackson and the Olympians series by Rick Riordan to them. I wanted to share with them magic and adventure, so that their minds would have somewhere to go when we could go nowhere.

We would sit on the couch, on the front porch swing, on the trampoline, or even the pool and I would watch as their eyes would light up over every plot twist, every battle. They would ask me questions and I would ask them some in return.

Those years were some of the hardest of my life but being with them and sharing those stories made every hard moment worth it. We were not able to finish the entire series before it was time for me to move on, but I gifted them the set so that their adventures might never end.

Some days they hated me for it, the stillness that came with reading. But every time we came together, I think they understood why, and I think they grew tremendously because of it.

This is all to say, that we desperately need to Zoom Out, or perhaps maybe Zoom In in this instance, to preserve the best parts of ourselves, and leave behind a legacy that allows those that come after us to be the best they can be too.

Books are humanity in our most honest form, in good and bad ways.

Books are not just books. Stories are not just words on a page.

How can they be? When they contain everything that we are.