or: Still So Much To Learn

Unfortunately for my electrician, in rewiring some of my lighting, he needed to move all my books. I hadn’t sorted them out at this point since it was still in the thick of my renovations and I didn’t know where I was going to put them all. Reading is one of my favorite 974 things to do in any location.

He was looking at their covers and told me he couldn’t work out how all these books linked together. There seemed to be no common element to them; no common theme.

“I am the common element,” I told him. He laughed and I then explained how they link.

He moved classics, children’s books (with pictures), books on fish, coaching, psychology, happiness, meditation, books about books, travel, modern novels, quotes, dictionaries, biographies and autobiographies, money, green living, photography, Asia, the state of the world and predictions about its future, religions, Human Resources and planning.

In writing this list, I can see that I still have a lot of books. Some are because of the memories and some are for my reference. Some I can donate and just haven’t got around to it yet.

If he peeked in my Kindle, he would have noticed even more variety in subjects. He would also notice I have downloaded a lot of samples.

These all relate to topics I want to know more about yet they don’t cover everything I want to know more about.

I have a list that I add to as I read for the other things I want to know or other books I want to read. It should have its own book. Goodreads is an excellent app for keeping track of the books though sometimes I forget to add them there!

This all started when I was a lot younger.

I am fortunate that I was always encouraged to read though at times there were books on our home bookshelf I wasn’t allowed to read. In my rebellious phase, I read these books too. I was even a nerd in how I rebelled! It also taught me quite a bit.

Whenever I had a question about the world, Mum would send me to our set of World Book Encyclopedias and tell me to look it up. I’d read the information on the topic and at the end it suggested other topics that linked to it. I read those too. It is easy to go down this rabbit warren when there isn’t anything else to do. This is also why I try not to spend so much time on the internet!

I was exposed to a lot of different things as a result.

Same thing would happen when I wanted to know the meaning of a word. I’d be sent to our World Book Dictionary. It’s difficult to find a word you can’t spell so I’d sound it out and have to search for it based on this. The “ph” / “f” sounds etc were always tricky and then, one day it all clicked into place. Mum would never spell out the word to help. The only time she spelt things aloud was when she didn’t want my brother or me to know what she was talking about with another adult.

I’m pretty sure this is how I learnt to spell “birthday”, “present”, “party” and “Christmas”.

By the time I went to university, my interests were a bit more defined to psychology and a deep love of English, both writing and reading. It was natural to then study these two topics in more depth and add communications to it. This was a great period for me. To only focus on learning the things I was interested in (as well as socializing but that’s an entirely different story!) was bliss.

I haven’t kept any of these books though I do have a few from my further studies (focused on business and Human Resources) as I refer to these in my work. These studies I undertook while working which was great in terms of being able to implement what I learnt immediately and having practical experience though to not be focused solely on learning would have been fun too!

I was always interested in nature yet never studied this beyond biology at school, reading and watching documentaries. Documentaries also exposed me to other cultures. These combined to inspire me to travel.

My Dad’s travels may have also added to this and knowing that many of my family over the generations moved from one country to another and a few did it multiple times. It should be no surprise that I have followed in these footsteps.

My travels and nature led to my interest in what we can do to protect the environment and learning more about my own impact and what I could improve.

Nowadays I am a very active Kindle user, partly because of space and partly because of cost. Books are much easier to transport this way and tend to be a lot cheaper than as a hard copy.

I continue to prefer referring to books over the internet since they are usually more in depth and I can see where I need to go next in order to find the opposing view (very few things are black and white in this world so I like to understand as many perspectives as possible) or for more information. I’d also rather not spend too much time in front of a computer screen since I don’t think it does my eyes or my posture any good.

My interests still continue to be psychology, reading and writing, nature and travel (culture and history) and expanded to include business practices, marketing (writing also falls into this part) and diving (this is where the fish books come into it).

I’m now more focused on understanding these things deeply and a few things broadly.

All the books fit with all of my interests – that’s their link.

 

* Thanks to Echo & the Bunnymen for the title to this post.