Over the long haul, much is possible
Late last year, I set a goal to read through all the works of Shakespeare in 2022. On one hand, that might seem like an ambitious reading goal. The man was prolific!?
On the other hand, spread out over 365 days, reading through all his plays and poems would only require reading about 3 pages in my anthology per day. I timed myself and realized that reading three pages would take about 15 minutes. In 15 minutes a day, I could read through the entirety of Shakespeare’s works in a year, as long as I just kept going.
And so I did. I started with?Twelfth Night. I’m currently reading?The Tempest. In between, I’ve hit all the famous plays I’d read before (Romeo and Juliet,?Midsummer Night’s Dream,?MacBeth), and all those I hadn’t (King Lear?and many others).?
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Reading Shakespeare is enjoyable for its own sake, but coming into the end of the year, I’m giddy for another reason. It’s the same elation that I felt last year after I read one of?War and Peace’s 361 chapters each day, and entered the epilogue around now. It’s the elation of seeing that small steps, taken daily, really do add up. Time keeps passing, and so the promise to myself at the beginning of the year was that if I did keep reading a little bit each day, by the end of the year I would have read all of Shakespeare’s works. It is now almost the end of the year, and the promise proved true.?
I guess that is obvious, but it still feels like a remarkable discovery. If you wish to read all the works of Shakespeare — or really, achieve a great many goals — all that stands between you and that might be 15 minutes a day for a year. Over the long haul, much is possible. And eventually, in any project, the long haul has happened. Looking back, those 15 minutes probably won’t seem like much. In any given day, it was just a matter of deciding to do it. But you did, and as a result, big things proved quite doable.
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