In the video on my content creator journey, I briefly mentioned my long-standing relationship with books.
I also gave you a preview of the Chinese expression that encourages you to “read ten thousand books and walk ten thousand miles”. We will get to that shortly.
As a seasoned bookworm, I noticed a subtle shift in the way I read:
I was no longer passively consuming stories.
Reading became a series of intimate conversations.
Conversations with people I will perhaps never meet, yet their lives have profoundly transformed my own.
“How do you come up with things to write about?”
Some people are surprised that I manage to publish one article a week.
In reality, I have been writing almost daily for the past seven years.
You may find writing difficult, and for a good reason:
Writing forces you to think.
Not just mental chatter or incessant looping thoughts.
Actually think–carefully and deliberately.
To this day, I have immense gratitude for the author of “12 Rules for Life”. His teaching initiated me into the life-changing practice of daily writing.
While I do not agree with all his opinions, he was a major influence for my early 20s, such as this quote:
“…unless you want to stay an ignorant, unhealthy lightweight, learn to write (and to think and communicate). Otherwise those who can will ride roughshod over you and push you out of the way. Your life will be harder, at the bottom of the dominance hierarchies that you will inevitably inhabit, and you will get old fast.”
– Dr. Jordan B Peterson
P.S. Can you tell I like people who skillfully combine eloquence and blunt honesty 😉 ?
I borrowed other people’s lives before finding my voice.
The most brilliant authors I’ve read are also avid readers.
They embody the lessons conveyed by this expression:
读万卷书，行万里路 (dú wàn juàn shū, xíng wàn lǐ lù).
- 读万卷书 (dú wàn juàn shū): read ten thousand books.
- 行万里路 (xíng wàn lǐ lù): travel ten thousand miles.
To understand Chinese expressions, we must go beneath the surface.
There are two pieces of wisdom hidden in this old gem.
Firstly, it is alluding to an essential life skill that many people dismiss:
The ability to learn from other people’s mistakes.
Some of you want to prove your strength and prove others wrong.
You want to experience the fire firsthand, despite other people’s warnings, skepticism, or disbelief.
As a strong-willed person myself, I see you, I get you, I understand.
Yet I eventually learnt the difference between meaningful struggles and useless detours.
Great books are written by insightful people who distilled years of experiences into a few hundred pages.
You gain access to decades of wisdom within a matter of hours.
If you consider yourself intelligent, then you understand the value of time.
There is only so much you can experience in one lifetime.
Why waste time making unnecessary mistakes when you can steal someone else’s homework?
Reading helped me see beyond the confines of my experiences.
Over time, the dialogue between books and my life became the foundation to my writing today.
This leads me to the second piece of wisdom hidden in 读万卷书，行万里路:
True power comes from a state of integration.
Most of us are trained to see dichotomies:
- Good or bad
- Left-brained or right-brained
- Book-smart or street-smart
What happens when people 读万卷书 (read ten thousand books), but do not apply the knowledge into their own lives?
They become what Chinese people call 书呆子 (shū dāi zǐ), or “bookish fool”.
What happens when people 行万里路 (travel ten thousand miles), yet do not take time to reflect upon their experiences?
They end up repeating the same mistakes over and over again.
Experiences–especially hardships–require a period of intentional, reflective incubation in order to become your embodied wisdom.
Or else, your history could become the trauma keeping you stuck.
During my darkest days, books gifted me the language and insight to free myself from mental loops and despair.
As a result, I move through life with ever more ease despite pain and hardship.
This is an example of integration: you can be both “book-smart” and “street-smart”.
The ultimate goal of reading books is integration.
It is never about impressing others with your intellectual prowess.
It is about developing the capacity to hold viewpoints from people who lived through what you couldn’t have fathomed.
It is about letting lifetimes of wisdom expand how you perceive the world.
It is about constructing inner coherence by using other people’s hard-won battles as your invisible mentor.
This is important. Because having coherence between your thoughts, emotions, and actions is key to a regulated nervous system.
And a regulated nervous system is necessary for discernment.
The founder of Dialogic Tarot puts it beautifully:
“The reader is not a passive container, but an active participant in the construction of meaning”
– Rita Rottelbac, PhD
I believe this does not only apply to tarot, but to reading in general.
We are always making meaning out of our experiences.
Why not let the wise books help us construct the most life-giving meaning possible?
What are you going to read next?
I don’t believe in reading for the sake of reading more books.
In fact, my book choices have always been informed by real-life questions, dilemmas and fascinations that I felt compelled to explore.
On the path to building a stronger sense of belonging, there are many similar obstacles that we all eventually encounter.
So I will be compiling book recommendations in the future, for those of you who are seeking answers to the deeper questions of life.
In the meantime, go enjoy my video on stop rushing and start living.
Until next time.
Love,
Crystal
