Reading? Meditating.

In the past few years I've been yearning for something I couldn't quite grasp.  About a year and a half ago it dawned on me.  To get lost in a really good book.  In my youth I loved reading and even excelled at it.  I would spend hours reading Anthony Horowitz's books, particularly the Alex Rider series.  Once partaking in the social hierarchies of middle school and high school, reading had evacuated my immediate attention.  Easily replaced, however, by intense sports that honed my discipline and vigor, among other things.  Fall 2014 is when I regained my inclination to reading, brought forth yet again by a professor at Tri-County Technical College whom we all knew as Coach.  He was an outdoorsy fellow with an abnormally long beard and on the first day of class we all thought we were listening to some homeless man posing as our Advanced English 103 professor.  But the appearance was part of his class: meant to just slightly grab your attention only to snatch that attention by the ears with striking rhetoric.  

As I struggled with college my first few years I noticed I had some trouble staying focused on long, dreary texts.  Of course this concern was put off by the obvious notion that it was due to the bland and unfascinating nature of the non-fiction required readings in introductory classes at university.  The blurry focus that had come to be my default setting grew with intensity, and in its last stages, trying to focus became like reading a road sign in extremely dense fog on a two-lane highway going about 65 mph.  Odd, right?  Well this was no coincidence, as a CT scan after a car wreck in 2016 would reveal my about quarter-sized benign low-grade tumor in the left frontal lobe, or frontotemporal lobe to be more precise.  We (my family and I) watched it remain the same size for about 3 years until, literally, the last semester of my senior year we (my neuro-doctor specialist) saw it grow to about the size of a half dollar.  For the remainder of my senior year I was plagued with headaches that affected my attention span but luckily for me I adored my major so much I decided to push through and graduate.  I graduated some odd Friday in August and had brain surgery that following Monday.  

I know what you're thinking.  What the hell does all this have to do with reading or meditation or whatever the hell this blog post is about Beau?  Here is the interesting part.  I was told the surgery would be minimal risk, 30-45 minutes long, and would have no ill-effects to any other part of my brain.  I wasn't taking any chances.  Post-op I had my family bring my all kinds of books and mini puzzles.  The puzzles I somewhat struggled with, but thats how its always been, or perhaps it was the anesthesia. The reading however flowed nicely, and a lot better than pre-op.  It gets better.  Whilst monitoring my vitals, whenever I would read I noticed they dropped into an almost meditative state.  Heart rate, temperature, oxygen levels, breath pattern, all more regulated when reading.  I found it.  The thing we love about reading so much about reading is that we are engulfed in a relaxed state and navigating an alternative state of consciousness.  It's quite a unique way of two minds communicating.