I spend a lot of time writing and even more thinking about writing. This is not a new phase in my life. I’ve always been this way. What is new, however, is that I read less.

I lived back and forth between my mom’s and dad’s houses as a kid. I preferred to live at my dad’s usually. I liked the small town and playing in the woods, and the quietness of it all. My mom lived in a larger city, however, and that had its perks too. One of those perks was, there was always a local library and I really, really liked that. During summer breaks and on Saturdays during the school year, I would ride my bike to the library early in the morning and wait for them to open. I would wander around for hours sometimes, just looking for a book that caught my attention, and then I would just sit and read. I would come back each day until I finished it. I’m not sure why I never took the books home. Maybe I just enjoyed the ambiance of it all.

As I got older and started driving, Barnes & Noble and Starbucks replaced the library. I would go into the store, order my black coffee, then wander for hours, looking for a book that caught my attention and read it there.

As days have given way to years, my living room and a cell phone have replaced the coffee shop and bookstore. I love my house and the people in it, but the ritual is not the same. But it’s not the location, it’s the texture. The feel of the book in my hands, the quiet nook with a reading lamp that serves no other purpose, the smell of the leather chair with brass buttons that outline its arms and its heavy upholstery stitches. It’s the smell of coffee that permeates the air.

I sit and I scroll with an increasing sense of urgency, as if the next thing I see will be the one thing that fills the void. Articles catch my attention, but only for a moment, and when I can finish one, the mental fight to not click away leaves me feeling exhausted, frustrated, and unfulfilled. It’s exhausting and I don’t know why.

So I write, and I wonder why no one reads. In a world that is never silent, I wonder how you would find the silence to read.

It’s this place, this world we’ve built where things are “better” and more accessible. The cities that never sleep have died, and with them, the twenty-four-hour markets have closed. Replaced by the retail stores that now live in our homes and listen to us talk, isolation and insomnia are constant companions. There is no silence to be found. This constant bombardment of information has broken us all and robbed us of the thing we need the most.

It has robbed us of silence.

So I bought a book, a paperback book. One I can bend and fold backwards along the spine. A book printed on heavy cream paper that I can dog-ear the corners of the pages to mark my place. Pages that become stained when I inevitably set my coffee cup on them. A book I can smell. And so I sit. I sit in silence and I read and remember a time when the world was a little less crowded and there was a little more wonder. And I think about how to convey that sense of wonder back to you.

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If you want to know more about how I ended up here doing what I do, maybe check out the book: Fragmented

~ Ryan