Academia

I am finishing my third semester as a full-time university student. It has taken a year and a half for me just to enter what I feel is academic-mode. Thats not to say I am really applying myself in school or anything like that. This semester in fact I feel that I have largely been on auto-pilot in terms of school related learning. I’m talking about that mode which includes a desire to read, observe, learn, and  discover coupled with an overall sense that there are things to know and desire to know them.

This school semester has been an aid in that though. My mythology class, upon reflection, seems to have been a major force in catapulting me into academic-mode. Starting this summer and continuing up to the present my desire to read has returned after a long absence. I’ve never been a voracious reader but I remember back in high school enjoying reading and learning through books.

However, while in the professional arena I think I lost that enjoyment and became intrigued and fixated on succeeding at whatever job I had. I saw books not as something to wind down with after work but as objects of education. Therefore I did not turn to them, even fiction, and instead used tv, movies, and video games (marginally) for distraction time. In fact during that professional period I tried to read and found it very difficult. My mind would race and wander halfway through a page making “reading” time a seeming waste as I seemed to gain nothing except frustration over not being able to focus. I did read a fair bit of news during that period though. The sensational, fast-paced, current-event-urgency style of western main-stream journalism made reading news an important task. It was not only easy to read but could be focused on since my goal-oriented mind included it in the tasks I needed to complete to be successful in my job. I was keeping up with the times and loving it.

Last year I had an hour-long commute, one-way to school. This fostered a breakthrough for me that came in the form of Robert Ludlum’s The Bourne Identity which I found in the MCU library and used to fritter away the commute. I found myself reading a book and enjoying it! Not only that but I could focus on it and would look forward to the next opportunity to read in it. In a word, it was wonderful! If this seems strange to you remember that my view of books, which has largely remained unchanged, are that they are educational tools. Even though it was trashy fiction I felt so productive reading it which was coupled with the fact that I enjoyed the story too. Emily and I returned home for the summer and the 4 or 5 (I forget) books that I had started over the past few years without finishing got read through. Not only that but after finishing them I started and finished other books! I kept thinking ‘this is so great! I can read and focus on what I’m reading and actually learn and get joy from it!’

Towards the end of the summer I devised a system: To continue enjoying reading I would limit the educational tool type books to every other at the most and include a fair bit of easy fiction so as not to forget that reading is fun. So far this system has worked and I have continued reading books. I don’t really read that much news anymore though.

Because of this renewed enjoyment of reading coupled with lessons God is teaching me I feel as though I am entering academic-mode. I feel like my “de-tox” from professional-mode is on the closing end for the present with the ratio increasing into academic side with each passing day.

It is easy to see why people never leave academic-mode. Since it is the mode of childhood (at least the mode that modern western society says should be of childhood) now it seems very natural to me to want to continue in it for a lifetime. Something that never appealed to me before. My professional-mode desire to accomplish has been replaced quite adequately with my academic-mode desire to understand.