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Eddie Hood
I am left handed, which means that my handwriting by default is pretty terrible. I've always had that story in my head that as I write, my hand goes over the letters that I write, smudges them. I can't see what I'm writing and so nothing in my journals or my notes makes sense. And today I decided to get better at my handwriting and that led me into how that relates to being a better reader. Now I'm going to walk you through my journals and what I've learned, and I think you might be able to relate to the process of improving your handwriting and at the same time improving your experiences as a reader. Let's Get into it welcome to this week's episode of the Read well Podcast. My name is Eddie Hood and I'm your host, where I believe it's more important to read well than to be well read. So grab your favorite book, open up your notes, and let's get ready to learn something fascinating. Hey everybody. Welcome back to the Readable Podcast. My name is Eddie Hood and today we're talking about sloppiness. I'm a pretty sloppy handwriter, I always have been. And it's because I have a story in my head that my ideas need to be captured as quickly as they come. And I'm a pretty fast spirited thinker. I'm not one to slow down in my head and really chew on things. When I get ideas, they come very, very fast and I try to keep up with them in my journals and get them down often. If I'm typing, I'm okay because I can type just as fast or at least close enough to my thinking process that it doesn't matter. And of course, every letter that lands on the screen looks just the same. So my problem comes in when I'm trying to write in my journals by hand. Now we're going to dig into that today with a few lessons learned. But before we do, if if you've liked the content I've created for you in the past, please take a moment to consider hitting the like button and subscribe. It really helps grow the channel and lets me know if the content is working for you or not. Okay, let's jump into this. So the first thought I had, I I started thinking back to some of the books I've read in the past and why they worked for me or why they didn't. And I kept thinking about Kurt vonnegut's book Slaughterhouse Five. When I first read this book, I was maybe 16 years old and I was absolutely not ready for this book. At the time, it was this weird about this guy named Billy Pilgrim who had done some things in the war and had seen a lot of death. And in the book, he's abducted by aliens, and he bounces around in random times, and it feels like a time travel novel. It's really crazy. And I was not prepared for this book. And so when I read it, I didn't like it. I wasn't mentally prepared for it, and I also wasn't at the right reading level to actually enjoy it. So let's talk about what that means now. I sat down at my desk today, and as I open up my journal, this started because I opened up my journal and I was just like, oh, my gosh, my handwriting is so bad, and I'm 44 years old, and I can't figure out how to write a clean word. This is why I often don't do videos for you guys or podcast episodes where I'm showing my notes because I can't even read them. So how are you ever going to read them? Well, just by making the idea in my mind present that my handwriting stinks. I moved to the next page in my journal, and as I wrote, something interesting happened. I improved. There is a clear difference in my journal from the left side of the page to the right side of the page, showing that just by thinking, just by the act of thinking or being conscious of my handwriting, the letters improved. And I'm like, wow, all right, this is exciting. I might actually be able to read my journals one day if I simply think about my handwriting as I do it. So then I got into, like, the YouTube university thing, and I started looking at videos on how to improve my handwriting, which there are many, by the way. And one thing I came across that really resonated with me is there was a gentleman talking about how speed does not equate to aesthetic writing. It's really difficult to write quickly and to have something aesthetic on page. Now, look, the point of a journal is not to be necessarily beautiful, at least for me. The point of a journal is, like, hold my thoughts, right? But here's the problem. If I can't read those thoughts later, then the journal negates itself, and I've just wasted. These things are expensive, right? This is one of those Leuchtra 1917 journals, which I love. They're like 25 bucks. And so that really starts to add up in the wallet. Anyway, the process of deciding to be aware of my handwriting has made a difference. And I really connected with his message that you cannot have aesthetic handwriting or beautiful handwriting if you're writing quickly. So the first thing you have to do is pull back the speedometer and let your hand pay attention to the lines it's making. Now here's what I found out. I don't physically know how to slow down when I write. I have got 44 years. Well, not that I've been writing since I was born, maybe 40 years. I don't know of writing as quickly and sloppily as I can. And it is really hard for me to break that habit. So this feels like reading for me. If we have spent our lives just reading quickly, we've just. We just think that we're supposed to read lots of books, that our friend reads a book a day, so I should read a book a day. And we've just been taught in school that speed matters. In fact, I've got a. I've got a little boy who's 10, he's in fifth grade right now. And his teachers, consistently for ever since he was in second grade have clocked his reading speed. And every year he's expected to get faster and faster. And yes, they do focus on comprehension, but I'm a little perturbed how much they focus on speed. And he's really bothered by it too. When he reads in school, he hates it because it's just about the speed. And these teachers want him at ridiculous numbers per minute. But at home, I kind of sabotage the teachers. Sorry. And I tell them, dude, just slow down. Like, enjoy the book, read the words, be in the story and let it, you know, work for you. He loves reading. He reads constantly. He's this 10 year old. He reads more than I do, which is hilarious. He's got books everywhere. He's always in the reading chair and I'm so proud of him for it. But he's had to learn to slow down. So that's the first thing I want to point out is that physically I don't know how to slow down when I hand write. I have to get better at that. So there's a skill in place related to speed. Right? It's very easy to do something quickly and sloppily. It's much more difficult to bring the pace back and to do it well and authentically. I think handwriting and reading books have a lot in common there in that arena. So there's that first point. Now the second point I want to make is that when I write with a pen, I start to get cramps in my hand. Like I can only write for a few paragraphs. And at the end of that, I start shaking my hand out. And then, because there's pain there, I just want to get through the writing thing. So I start speeding up even more just to get it over with. And I notice that I'm, like, gripping my pen with all of the strength in my hand just to, like. I don't know why I do that, but I really clasp down on my pen and I have to consciously, like, relax the muscles in my hand, get. Get the pain to go away. And as I write, my hand gets more and more tense, and it's this constant battle with the physicality of my fingers. And so that is also connected to reading. I've noticed that the longer I read, the more physical pain I can endure. I end up having pain in my neck. After a while, as you're sitting, your arms hurt and maybe your back hurts. Now, the more you read, the better you get at this. You actually build, build a physical presence that works for sitting down over long periods of time and enjoying a book. But at first, that training, we're going to call this training, like, it's like gym training, but that training is not there. And so after a few minutes, you're probably already feeling that pain in your lower back, and you're just not really comfortable. And so you either read quickly to get done or you put the book down. Just being aware that's a real thing that everybody deals with. It is, I think, the first step. And know that because reading is a skill, all you have to do is be patient with it and practice. You will get better at first. Again, you might only have five minutes of reading time in your body to sit still, but after a while, you might be able to get to 30 minutes. Now, I've been reading a lot for a long time, but I really only have still maybe 30 minutes in me of reading time before I start getting, like, creaky and achy and like, oh, man, this isn't working. So I always like to read while I pace the room. I hold up a book while I'm reading, and I will walk back and forth because I can kind of see peripherally what's happening around me. I won't bump into things, and I'll enjoy a book that way. And that really seems to work for me for a long period of time. I can extend my reading to an hour or two hours if I do that. And it's all just change back and forth between sitting and then walking the room with my book. So give that a shot you can try other things, different chair positions. I also like to stack pillows on my lap and then put the book at eye level up here and let the pillow hold the book as well. So not only am I looking at the book head on, which prevents headaches, because if I look down at a book, I get tension in the back of my neck. So looking straight on definitely helps. And not having to hold the book keeps your arms from going numb over time. And it also frees you up to have a nice cup of coffee or, you know, just saying. So there you go. Anyway, we're talking about the skill of handwriting and how it relates to the skill of reading. And to summarize this point, as I write quickly, my hand starts to cramp. That's a normal thing. We are doing something physical here. But also, reading feels like you're not being physical. It feels like you're sitting and relaxing, but in reality you're not. You're definitely having to sit in a specific position. And depending on the books, like this is Robert Sapolsky's Behave I'm holding in my hand. That's a decent book. It's like almost 700 pages. It's not that heavy because it's a light paperback, but it's big. This is not comfortable to hold in your hand for more than a few minutes. So, yeah, just be aware that this thing is a skill. The next thing I want to point out when we're reading books and how it relates to handwriting is that you bring your baggage to the practice of writing and reading. So if I show up at my journal and I've had a really bad day, right, and I've got like. Like tension in my neck and my arms, all of that tension finds its way onto the paper. And now I'm writing even more chaotically. It's very sloppy. If I'm feeling at peace and calm, then, yeah, my writing is going to be a little bit better. But I'm just not a great writer, so that kind of doesn't last very long. And what I want to point out here is that you do the same thing with your books. You bring yourself to your books. And there's this great saying. It's in a lot of the different stoic philosophy books about how you take yourself with you wherever you go. So if you're trying to escape a hard or difficult life, you can't achieve that by going on vacation or moving. You can find some, like, you know, temporary happiness in new locations. But after a couple days, you're going to bring all your emotions and anxieties with you. And it's just going to feel the same as it did there as it does here. So the same thing is with a book. When you sit down and you open up a new book, you're bringing all of you with it. And when I first read Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse Five, I brought with me my 15 year old personality. I was not ready for the symbolism in this book. I wasn't ready for even the layout of it. It can feel very poetic at times. Sentences are broken up and structured differently. And it's definitely an experience to read Slaughterhouse Five and there's comedy in there. I wasn't expecting comedy and absurdity galore. This book is full of absurdity. So if you're not familiar with reading in that absurdist frame of mind, you're only rooted in realistic thinking. This book will make absolutely no sense to you. You won't be ready for it. At the time, I was very much into reading crime thrillers. That's all I was reading. Like the really fast Pacey thrillers that, you know, get you going. That's really what got me back into reading when I was younger. And I love those books, I'm grateful for them. But my mind was on those kinds of books which are very plot driven, very, very page turning, what happens next kind of stories. So when you get into Slaughterhouse 5, all of that goes away. Like there is no like running from the murderer kind of thing to keep you turning pages. And you need to sink into a world and that world and these characters get you turning pages. Because I wasn't used to that, I didn't like it. And it's taken me several books and years of getting into these other kinds of stories to begin appreciating them. And now of course, Slaughterhouse 5 is an incredible book. I absolutely love it. I love what it stands for and I love the concepts in this book. But it has taken me a long time to get there. Yeah, go check it out if you want to try something a little more absurd. The last point I want to make before we wrap up this episode is that not only are we bringing our baggage to these books or to our handwriting, we're also bringing our experience level. Now, I was in a philosophy class last week, actually. It's a class called the Philosophy of Western Religion. It's very fun conversation to be having, but we're actually on Kierkegaard right now. Soren Kierkegaard. And he had these interesting ideas about how as humans we have, I'm going to call them perspectives like three. Three big perspectives that we can kind of move into as human beings. And the first one for Kierkegaard, this will relate, by the way. Stick around, it's interesting. The first one is the aesthetic perspective, or stage, whatever you want to call it, where you value everything based on its beauty, its level of beauty. Good things are beautiful, bad things are ugly. This is where we start off as human beings, when we don't know a whole lot about life, we just judge based on surface level characteristics, right? And then the next sort of perspective you move into is an ethical perspective, where that beauty falls away and you start to think of life, you know, as like, what is right and what is wrong. How should I behave at work, in the world as a human being, with myself, with my spouse? You start to think about actions and why they do or do not matter. And then for Kierkegaard, the third perspective is a religious or a spiritual perspective where you start to bring in a higher deity. Now, here's why I'm telling you all of this. Because for Kierkegaard, when you're in one perspective, the other two don't make sense, right? You can't accurately evaluate those perspectives. You're not looking at the world through that lens, and you have to go through a real sort of transformation to be in that new perspective. And once you're there, the old perspective makes no sense. So, example, let's say you're born, you're raised in the aesthetic perspective, like we all are. We judge everything by beauty, physicality, how things look, how things feel, yada, yada, yada. But then one day, when we move into the ethical experience, usually something happens to us. There's an event in our lives that sort of gives us a new perspective. And a great example of this might be having children where before you have kids, it kind of doesn't make sense to have kids, really, if you think about it. If I were to ask you pre child what you liked about life, you might say, oh, I like having my freedom. I like having disposable money. I like sleeping in on the weekends. I like doing what I want when I want. All of those things completely clash with the idea of having children, right? And so for people without kids, they might be wondering, why would I give all of those things up? But when you have a child, something in you changes, and you usually shift perspective to where it's not that those things don't matter anymore, but you just see the world differently. New things become More important to you. And that's a great example of how you might move into the ethical perspective at that point and begin thinking, how should I be acting? What's really important here? Because you feel the necessity of leading this other human being and not messing it up in any way, shape or form. I remember when I had my first kid, I felt all of these things, right? I was 20, I was young, 22, when I had my first son. And I was not ready for it. But the day I had him, I felt a physical and a mental shift. And I've been in that world for a very long time ever since. So I share that with you because I feel like when we're reading, we also have perspectives. I don't think they're the same. Well, let me back that up. I do think that we have an aesthetic perspective where when we first start off as readers, we judge a book based on how beautiful the COVID is, right? There's some really beautiful covers out there these days. And all we really care about is like the flashiness of it. How many good reviews is it getting? I don't know. I'm making this up. But definitely we are caught up in the razzle dazzle, like fireworks around the book, right? If it's getting lots of press, it's getting must be a good book. But then as we start reading all of these books, we branch out and we start to read books from authors all around the world and we hear different voices and different perspectives and we learn new things and all of a sudden we shift into a wider ability to read. When I first started reading, for me, my aesthetic experience I'm going to stick with that, was that the book had to make me turn the page. If I wasn't like turning the pages quickly, it wasn't a good book. I really was not interested in putting the time in to getting to know a character and what made them tick and why this story about a family mattered and so on. I just wanted like murders and car chases and interesting things, right? It's like going to the museum. I'm not an art historian and I can walk through a museum and absolutely appreciate all of the art there. But I am fascinated by the guy that when I walk in at 8 in the morning, he's standing there looking at a painting, like genuinely looking at it. I go through the whole museum and when I come out the exit, that dude is still there looking at this painting. And I'm thinking to myself, what are you getting out of this? Like, it's just a picture but he's in a different level than I am. He's in a different perspective than I am. And books can be the same way. When you read Slaughterhouse 5 as a great example, or any book, you might walk through and go, yeah, okay, that's a great story. But there are people that are reading these stories and really getting down to the base layer of them and just appreciating them at a different level. And I want to communicate to you that is very possible for you if there's a book you don't like right now. This last point I want to make, I lied before. If there's a book that you're struggling with, that doesn't mean that you don't necessarily get it. It doesn't mean that you're not smart enough. In fact, I felt stupid many times reading books where I've thought like, this is just way over my head. Why am I not getting this? Especially now that I'm getting a degree in philosophy. Those books, reading those kind of feels like I'm swimming in, I don't know, primordial mud. Sometimes it's just thick reading that, honestly, you have to read very slowly, and then you have to go for a walk, they have to come back. You have to read the same passage very slowly. And after a while, it starts to make sense. But that process has actually been really good for me because it has forced me to take what I thought was slow reading and to slow it down forex even more and really chew on something. And there are days where I have to spend the afternoon thinking about a paragraph that I read for a course I'm in, and eventually it will click. Now, here's the benefit of that. Sure, I understood, at least at a deeper level, what that paragraph meant, but my brain somehow shifted into a higher perspective. I'm not going to say I got smarter. I just moved to a different reading level so that when I came back to books like Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut, it wasn't just a story about this weird guy named Billy Pilgrim being abducted by aliens. There was a deeper meaning to it, something that I couldn't see before. It wasn't there. Okay, that's what I want to share with you today. Just that reading is a skill much like my handwriting. And as I sat down today and looked through my journal and went, oh, my goodness, my handwriting is miserable. And I really embarrassed to even read these notes, I came to the conclusion that, no, I'm not stuck with bad handwriting. I can unlearn these bad habits and it's going to start with, one, choosing to be aware that my handwriting matters. And two, choosing to slow that speed down enough so that I can control the letters I put on page so that the words come out as words that I'll be able to understand later on. Right. Reading is the same way. Just choose to be conscious with it. Choose to slow down. If the book's not making sense to you, pull that speedometer back and let it do its job. And if it's still not working for you, it might just not be the right time of life for you. You might be in a difficult setting. You know, if you've experienced a trauma recently, then a tragic book might feel extra heavy and that's just not where you want to be right now. Maybe you have lost a love in your life, and so reading a romance might feel really painful. So it's important to know where you're at where you're at in life. And I think reading is a constant process of being in communication with yourself. There's a time to read Charles Dickens and there's a time to not read Charles Dickens. Right? Anyway, I just want to thank you all for listening to the Readable podcast and supporting me. I am coming up on my 100th episode soon, early part of May, I'm going to be holding a live event where I'm going to be giving out free gifts to everybody in the community. Not everybody. Good grief. That would be a lot. But I'll be giving out books and coffee and a whole bunch of other things. So stay tuned on my YouTube channel if you're interested in that. You can also hear more about it on my Facebook page. And until next time, as always, remember to read slowly, take notes, and apply the ideas. Thanks for listening, guys. If you'd like to take your reading to the next level, then head on over to thereadwellpodcast.com there you'll find daily posts on how to read well. You'll also get access to all of my book notes and tools for becoming a better reader. And as always, don't forget to read slowly, take notes and apply the ideas. Thank you for listening to the Read well podcast.