Dear Reader,

Consider the extended podcast radio-mega remix version of today’s newsletter at Rhythms of Focus.

• Kourosh

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For some wandering minds, reading a book is about as difficult as climbing a mountain, mountaineers notwithstanding. Getting to the book at all is one hurdle, and staying with the book is yet another.

We might blame our wandering minds, or say, “I’m not a visual learner” Either might be true.

Sometimes if you’re like me, you might just fall asleep.

I’ll even go through waves of falling asleep, open the book, read another sentence, and I’m out again. But after a while, sometimes something clicks and I’m off and running.

As we read, I think there’s a formatting stage that isn’t often discussed. Especially when we’re first starting a book, new concepts are coming to mind.

For them to make any sense, we need to reflect, connecting things together. When our minds have this tendency to wander, the initial sensation of discovering, difference, and discrepancies isn’t always about wonder.

Instead, it’s about confusion. And because the birth of confusion is often unconscious, we don’t recognize what caused it. Confusion appears when something doesn’t make sense. Usually two or more things somehow don’t connect. Maybe this sentence and that don’t seem to have anything to do with each other. And we just went by not realizing it. Maybe an idea just appearing seems to conflict with something Only vaguely remembered from this last page, last paragraph, last chapter.

Or maybe the words stir a set of associations, some thoughts and daydream. Something gets touched off within a recollection, A moment of sadness, joy, shame, excitement. The grocery item you just forgot.

Confusion can be this large billowing fog obstructing much of whatever it is that we would see. We daydream, maybe reading the same paragraph over and over.

Or we fall asleep. The wandering mind myopic and magnified it as it is and its views of the now are particularly susceptible to emotions, huge in swallowing as they can be.

So how do we regain ourselves? How do we engage and feel alive again?

Confusion is often a sign of disconnect, whether between concepts on the page or between the page and my own associations.

To bridge the disconnect, I often like to use the question:

Sometimes I discover a connection, and when I do, I’m often feeling alive again.

Sometimes I don’t find a connection. But having asked the question itself somehow helps contain that confusion.

Now, of course, this is not foolproof. Sometimes I still fall asleep. But I take solace in the idea that sleep can often be about formatting, about consolidation.

I’m bringing together of worlds of thought and idea between myself and another person. And the deeper the resonance into the unconscious worlds, the greater the mysteries of sleep are ready to do their work.

• Kourosh