Strange things happen to time when you’re reading a book. It moves more slowly, and yet passes more quickly. When you read a good novel and let your imagination roam free the experience is different than working, or watching television, or being otherwise marooned in realtime. Like dreaming, reading is an important escape, a time to reflect and reorganize the jumble inside your head. For me, at least, reading a good book leaves me feeling awed and inspired and refreshed. And so it is so odd that I find myself so easily forgetting to read, or forgetting how to, or forgetting what it is like. I spend my day in front of a screen covered in words, manipulating those words to create new words, modifying those new words to create shapes and colors and more words, words that can be sorted and searched and categorized, all electronically, always dancing from place to place. All day, with the words, but it isn’t the same. The words mean something different when they are dancing.

It is important. Important to remember the difference in the words, the difference between the words that dance and the words that sit still. Important to remember that dancing is something we do every day, but sometimes we must rest, slow time, read the words that stay still on the page. Let them dance, instead, inside of our heads, where time has a different meaning, where the dance is to a more subtle and beautiful song.