Reading, problems and art

Here's a little something from The Age.

"Reading is our favorite art form to consume. 84% of Australian say they read books"

Impressive figure eh? You cannot walk around Melbourne and not see at least one person reading a book, whether while in a tram, or waiting for one, in the park or even when lining up for movie tickets.



How many of you turn to books when you have a problem? Life problems, I mean. I dare bet that most of you have never thought of such an idea before. Many of us would turn to friends, who tell us how cruel life can be, sobbing while slowly expressing how difficult breaking-up is, angrily complaining how much of a jerk  your so-called best friend is. Others might  just keep to themselves and hope that time will heal the heart, the friendship, the annoyance.

Friends are not entirely reliable when it comes to solving problems though. Most of them are just there to comfort you, telling all those good things you wanted so much to hear. I'm not saying thats bad. But lets put it this way; it's good in a bad way because at the end of the day your problems aren't really solved. In fact, your problems may even worsen when you discover that those words of advice weren't truly the keys to solving your problem.

Here's an example. Let say you had a huge fight with one of your best friends. You go to another best friend and tell them about the fight you had. The friend might comfort you and might wanted to cool you down by saying that the best friend is a jerk and should apologize. The problem is, you were the bad one.

I'm not making a generalisation, and saying that all friendly advice is 'ill-advised'. But to say that most of them are, would not be an overstatement.

I once had this huge problem (for me at least, i'm not sure if anyone else would call it that). Apart from not having a friend that i can and truly rely on (don't tell them, its just how I feel), I kept to myself, and repeated those magic words "time heals". It worked for me before, But not this time. The issue  continued to haunt me. At last i told a friend and asked for his advice. Though his advice was fairly logical, I could not figure out whether it was told to comfort me or to solve the problem.

Thats when i tried something different. I bought this book that is fairly related to the problems that i was having and started reading it. Reading the book, i felt if as i'm talking to the soul itself (mine of course), which provided me with an insight into what my problems really were about while the author gave some advice on how to deal with/solve them. The thing with the book is, you surely knew that the book would never please you. Most of the advice is bitter but medicine taste worst eh? and look at what miracles medicine has brought us.

Furthemore, all of the writing was written based on the experience of thousands of people facing the same problems that we have. So the odds of solving the problems are high enough. You'll be amazed to find out that you are not the only one having such miserable life, and others are much worse off. The key is solving it once and for all. Not just hoping some good words to please you and time healing miracle.

At the end, its all up to you. No matter how much books you  read, or advice you hear, be it from friends, family, you are the one that have to do the final step in acting accordingly to solve the problem. God will never help you, if you yourself never make an effort in doing so.

Now, no wonder Australian love reading books and even regard it as an art form. Reading is for nerds? Think again!