There is a lot to get out of books. And different people pick up on different things depending on what resonates with them. I, for example, may underline and annotate in detail something that you merely skim past and vice versa. Books (a form of human connection) as well as relationships, when showing us a new perspective, connect us deeper to the human experience as whole. And, when you change inwardly, gaining new insight, you are able to relate to a larger host of not only books but a wide variety of people, too.
The Book’s Format Allows for a Dynamic Interaction
Books allow for a personal, dynamic interaction between the author and the reader. The connection between the book reader and the book (or author) is a bit stronger than the connection between the movie watcher and the movie (or producer, writer). This is because book have less stimulants (merely holding words on pieces of paper); in comparison to movies, which have sound, moving pictures, they allow our brains to create the mental picture that it’s describing. We are not creating what the author meant to create, completely, but we are creating what the author touched within us, drawn from our own experiences.
Our brains can only create pictures and images based on what it has seen before (for example, in dreams). In dreams, we see familiar people, places, things, not new ones, because our brains cannot create new things. Where we see strangers are really ‘recycled’ from people in our past. “Based on what dreams are and where dream content comes from.. it is more likely that the strangers in our dreams are a version of someone we’ve seen in our waking lives,” (Seigneur, 2021). When reading, our mind creates mental pictures that draw on our past experiences.
In this way, books show us something about ourselves – the images pop up in our mind for a reason. When we feel something about a book resonate with us, it is like a reflection of what is inside of us. Some call it catharsis, emotional relief, but it is also mental, psychological, a cognitive illumination – it shows us what we care about and what we want, and maybe also what is still hurting us.
I have a vivid memory of one mental picture I created while reading. The book was talking about two friends who went to a house to make some extra money working in someone’s yard. Clearly in my head came my grandpa’s yard. Why it was his yard, and not my own front yard, or my cousin’s yard, I don’t know. It could have been how the yard was described, something about what happened in the following scenes.
We connect to books in the ways that we have lived.
Connections and Relationships Act in a Similar Way
Connections are the same. What someone says may connect with you more than another person because it resonates with you. Just as an author communicates their experiences, so do real people in real time.
But the connection between books and people is that how they feel to us depends on us – our experiences, how we feel about ourselves, our knowledge and insight.
We may be better able to accept something, upon reading fiction, or upon connecting with someone, holding a relationship with them, about ourselves that we could not before accept.
Expanding our Perspectives to Feel More Connected to Humanity as a Whole
When we expand what we have been through, we expand who we can connect with, how deeply we can connect with them and what we can connect with them about. When we embrace our shared humanity, when we see people for people, when we try new things, when we learn, in any essence really, about the different textures of the human experience, we as individuals feel closer to that shared human experience. We feel that we are part of a whole house of humanity, as opposed to being confined to one room.
In order to get more out of art, and in order to get more out of connections, we can cultivate more self-love, more self-awareness. In this way, when you change inwardly, the outside world starts to look different, it starts to feel different.
When we interact with and embrace the human story, with truth, and through the discomforts, we embrace all that we are, we heal all that was broken and we become who we were meant to be.
Notes
Seigneur, E. (2021, January 5). Can the sleeping brain create unique people that the waking brain has never seen before?. NeuWrite West. https://www.neuwritewest.org/blog/2ziwctdnh0wehgdq1iqyo3eextkrvm
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