Sweeney 1

Alyssa Sweeney

Professor Lori Bedell

CAS 138T

14 February 2021
This I Believe: Reading as a Ritual

“Hansel crumbled the bread in his fingers and dropped the crumbs one by one onto the

path, leaving a broken trail behind him and his sister.”

My Mommom’s voice crackled with electricity as she read from the children’s version of

the Grimm’s Fairy Tales book she kept on her bookshelf. I was two years old, and although I

only grasped bits and pieces of the story, I turned toward her, wanting to hear more. She always

obliged, reading to the end of the story.

In kindergarten, I was able to read on my own, and I did so voraciously, sucking the

words off of the pages of books and workbooks alike like a Plecostomus fish. I gravitated toward

books about animals and stories about magic, but really, I was willing to read anything I could

get my hands on. My friends noticed me reading, and I shared stories with them. It became not

just a solitary activity but a tool for building connections with others. Our laughs skittered into

the warm classroom air as I mimicked the voices of wise old wizards.

By fourth grade, I was reading books like Dragon Rider and massive series. Books of

every genre became vessels for empathy, and by reading them I became more and more

compassionate, tending to the emotional landscapes of my friends and acquaintances who needed

a listening ear. I learned from the characters in stories that the most important moments in life

are those measured in kindness. Each time I read, I grew more pensive about the meaning of our

existences, and the things that make us human.

 Sweeney 2

In middle school and early high school something changed. I drifted away from reading,

something that had been integral to my life. Burgeoning mental illness and social media made it

nearly impossible to focus on the words on the page, so I turned my back on the stories that had

shaped me. Perhaps not because of my deviation from my reading but surely correlated with it

was a distance from my past traits of thoughtfulness, curiosity, and empathy. I fell into a habitual

existence, one in which I lived on “autopilot.” I didn’t think about what I did, I just did it.

Everything was automatic. It was akin to a deep depression, and it is a testament to the survival

mechanism it may have been that while I was in that state, I didn’t notice anything different

about myself. In retrospect, I was utterly changed.

Years later, I rediscovered reading as a way to start piloting the plane myself again. I

started reading regularly like I did when I was little. I read Louise Glück and Gillian Flynn,

Hannah Arendt and Erich Fromm. I surrounded myself with literature like I was a caterpillar

encasing myself in a chrysalis. The deliberate act of reading forced my mind to slow down, to

consider the lives of the people on the page or to ponder the ideas proposed between the lines.

The conscious thought didn’t stop in the pages of the book, either. I thought about the books

after I put them down and applied their principles to my life. In this way, reading became a

ritual.

Confucius makes a distinction between habits and rituals. Habits, he says, are the ruts and

patterns we fall into. They are automatic and unconscious. My period of “autopilot” exemplifies

habits. Rituals, on the other hand, are the behaviors in which we deliberately engage to disrupt

habits and change our lives for the better. I believe in reading as a ritual.