How You Can Make Your Summer Last Longer

Welcome back! Recently I wrote about the power of micro-adventures. Adventures don't have to be epic and complicated. We can find just as much joy and novelty in our backyards.

This month I've been thinking about the power of deep reading. This is the kind of active reading that can take you on another kind of adventure - an adventure of imagination.

My Mom became somewhat famous among our family and friends for destroying TVs. She threw the first television out the second story window. About a year later, she threw another one down the staircase from the second floor landing. A third TV she picked up and hurled off the back deck of our house.

After the stunned silence, we would live without a television for a few months, or a year, I don't remember how long. Then my Dad wanted to watch Sunday football, and he would go buy another one.

It wasn't the technology she objected to per se. After all, in 1983 Beverly Hunter published a book called My Students Use Computers. It wasn't the technology she objected to, it was the content. It was the passive, mindless, consumption of Saturday morning cartoons - which, by the way, I have fond memories of. Hong Kong Fooey, The Jetsons, Scooby-Doo, Shazam! I could go on. She wanted us out in the world creating, building, learning, doing...something immersive.

I recently reconnected with that immersive feeling of active reading - that feeling of getting lost in a great book, drawn into the narrative, focused on the story, and even the style of the writer to such an extent that once you put the book down, you still think like the author you are reading.

Nicholas Carr argues in his book The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains, that it is the medium itself that changes how we think. Likely all of us have experienced reading versus listening to a novel. It's just different. We comprehend and absorb information differently. Carr suggests that the less we immerse ourselves in long-form reading, the more we devalue it.

“Unlike watching television or engaging in the other illusions of entertainment and pseudo-events, deep reading is not an escape, but a discovery."

- Robert Waxler and Maureen Hall

Recently I had an internet hiatus. It wasn't easy, but it had wonderful results. Some friends and I headed into the Allagash Wilderness in northern Maine in July. It's a stunningly beautiful 92-mile waterway of lakes and rivers surrounded by wilderness preserve land. Often referred to as legendary, serene, and magnificent, it is also one of the few eastern rivers that can be paddled for a week or longer without coming into contact with modern civilization.

The Allagash is accessible only by hours of driving logging roads, and when we lost cell signal just north of Millinocket, Maine, I knew we would be out of contact for a week. At that point my phone simply turned into a camera.

I began sorting through my mind, making sure I had tied up all loose ends before disappearing, and then I remembered what I had forgotten to do. We had some AirBnB renters coming to our cabin, and I had not told them where the key was hidden. I was the only person corresponding with them, and while we had thoughtfully prepared our cabin for their arrival, I had forgotten to tell our guests where the key was. They would arrive in three days, but I would not emerge from the wilderness for six days.

This unfinished task nagged at me for two days. At one point we encountered a ranger and I inquired if it was possible to send a message out. He said downriver a day's paddle was a satellite phone at a ranger's cabin for emergencies. I conceded it wasn't exactly an emergency.

On the morning of the third day, we decided to hike up a mountain at round pond to a fire tower. I figured if I had any chance of sending a message out to the world, it would be on the top of that mountain. Sure enough, halfway up the fire tower I received one bar on my cell phone and sent our guests a message about the location of the key to our cabin.

Freed of that one nagging distraction, the days became even less hurried. We would paddle through the mornings, snack, listen to the birds, search the shorelines for moose, and pay attention in the gentle class I and II rapids.

And read. We would read and read. I brought a novel called A Tale for the Time Being, which I highly recommend. It's an inventive story about a young girl growing up in Japan, developing strength through Zen mindfulness, and ultimately touching the lives of another family through time.

“Deep reading is the slow and meditative possession of a book. We don’t just read the words, we dream our lives in their vicinity." - Sven Birkerts

The experience has reminded me how to properly read again. How to get lost in a story, and then let it visit you throughout the day. Deep reading shields you from distraction, and in doing so, gives you more time to explore, to think.

If you want to expand your knowledge, and broaden your imagination, the key is to become a voracious slow reader.

We have all of August ahead of us. Go on. Find a book and a quiet place.

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Recently I wrote about Mindscaling's big project to convert Faisal Hoque's book,?LIFT?into an interactive learning documentary. You can see previews of that elearning project, and his important new book?here. Our company?Mindscaling, is busy building powerful online micro-learning experiences to drive the human change that propels your team. You can find our catalog of high-impact courses?here. And if you want something more tailored, you can learn about our custom work?here.

My book?Small Acts of Leadership, is a Washington Post bestseller! You?can?grab?a copy here. And if you want to learn to apply some of these ideas and be an effective coach for your team, we wrote a course on that too. It’s called?Coaching for Managers?available over at UDEMY for Business.