Blog 1: We must start at the beginning

Are you the first person to come across this blog?

Lately I have met again with an old love of mine. I have been completely captured after coming back from a multiple year hiatus. This reunion was complicated. At first it took me a lot of work to get back to my old habits, now I can say, and I am quite proud of this, that I have gone back to my old habits, becoming even better at it than I was before.

I got back to reading. Growing up I used to read, somewhat. Few books a year, I would make steady progress. I have always been a fan of the classics. I used to exclusively read in Spanish, and when I got back to reading about a year ago, to not big immediate success, I attributed this lacklustre progress to reading in English.

The first book I picked up after this hiatus was non other than Herman Melville’s magnum opus, Moby-Dick or, The Whale. I will tell you the truth. The prose was nothing like I had ever come across, given the fact that my second language is English. I had to read multiple times entire pages until I would understand what was being told. It took me about a year of spotty progress to get about halfway trough the book. It was a hard task, I wanted to leave the book unread many times, and many times I did. But something about leaving things unfinished has always bothered me, so I continue going, picking up the book and forgetting about it all the same.

One morning came. Feeling groggy, having a strong brain fog. I found myself laying on the couch, in a gross, unkempt way, staring at the screen of my phone. I had spend hours barely alive, scrolling. “I have a goals and desires in life. Being on my phone, laying like a sloth on this couch, and staring at the screen doing this garbage had noting to do with who I wanted to be, and what I wanted to do” I thought. So I asked myself this: Then why do I do this?. That moment I got up and took a cold shower, as cold as I could handle in order to feel something, anything and wake myself from this self induced coma. I cleaned my house, and sat myself down to finally complete Moby-Dick. From that day on I read 100 pages until I finished the book.

After that I have been reading every single day as much as possible. I finished the book, and I can say, that despite the fact that I did struggle to complete the book, it’s one of my favorite books of all time, and I can’t wait to revisit it once more some time in the future, maybe I’ll even make a post about it in this very blog.