Tag: life

Skimming time

Leave a comment

I’ve been noticing an awful behavior in myself: skimming.

When articles are longer, even if engaging, I find myself beginning to skim partway through, my eyes darting around searching for keywords alone to understand and judge the content, even as I know that that is not understanding.

When I read books, I now sometimes skim pages to get to the book’s end sooner, so I can move on to the next book, because my ever-growing TBR list is, well, ever-growing. I have lists of books I want to read this year, which I do every year, and never get through said lists. Yet I make them anyway, adding more to it, even as I barely cut through the titles.

And I wonder, how much of this is driven by my need to add and track my reading goals? How much am I being driven to read more, learn more, understand more, because of all the lists I create, and the reading goals (# books, # pages) on Storygraph or Goodreads I set for myself each year? Perhaps, I wonder, that the goal of reading less but more fully, is actually the better goal. That instead of saying I will read 100 books this year, perhaps I should tell myself, I will read 40 books this year. Or maybe, I have no goal in mind, except to understand a chosen topic.

This year, I actually deleted my initial reading and page goals on Storygraph, and instead decided to simply read, only tracking titles I’ve finished, and the lists of books, the Challenges, I want to participate in. Now, I’m wondering if I should even bother with those Challenges as they are, and instead curating one single list of limited titles, based on a topic I want to learn more about this year. That instead of worrying about how many books I’m getting through, I should consider what I’m thinking deeply about. Rather than fear of missing out on knowledge, which drives me to rush through a book to get to the next, I ant to reframe it as sitting with wisdom, which can only come after letting knowledge take its time. What is the use of rushing through the pages, only to come out the other end with only a vague notion of what I’ve “learned?” It is not, in fact, learning.

I wrote in another article that I purged my home library of 200+ physical books, which has helped me more clearly select books to read, because I’m not caught up in analysis paralysis. And it has helped, as I pulled out books I bought a dozen years ago, and have finally cracked open. One title, The One Taste of Truth: Zen and the Art of Drinking Tea I am certain I’ve had since the early 2010s. Now, as a ritual, I make golden milk and read just a few pages, trying to imbibe the wisdom in the pages. The book is short, and yet I’ve been going through just a few pages per week, hardly making a dent in finishing the book. And I’m fine with that.

This year, something’s switched in my brain, where I am feeling less driven by goals and to-dos and being productive, something I spoke to in my article, The Stillness of Sufficiency. This drive to shed even reading goals, in terms of the numbers, is one piece of this overarching puzzle. I don’t mourn it, which I find surprising, because I have always been driven by “the numbers:” school grades, work performance review ratings, and everywhere else numbers show up in our lives: “likes” and comments on social media, the number that shows up when we step on the scale, the number of social events we attend, etc.

Something is in the 2026 air, because I am done with tracking and trackers, with distilling my lift into “the numbers.” Perhaps it’s because it all seems futile and only serves to create anxiety, perhaps it’s fatigue, or perhaps it is emotional growth. Whatever the reason, I find it is more fulfilling, and a necessary shift in my intellectual, emotional, and life maturity.

The only “number” I think I am beginning to care about is, well, none in particular. I simply want to live more fully, slowly, and with a depth I seem to have lost over the years. I don’t want to skim, I want to immerse, to take my time, and to shed old ways of simply moving from one goal or task to the other and replace that with more holistic views of being. Instead of relying on a quantified experience of life, I want to live in a more exploratory and contemplative way. Instead of having a “backlog” pressure, I want to feel free to read as much or as little, and to take as much space as I need to to fully feel and understand what I’m reading.

Even my writing has changed this year. I am focusing less on all the manuscripts I am dying to write, all the stories I am desperate to tell, and more on simply telling a good story and giving it space and time to breathe. I’ve begun exploring a manuscript this year I hadn’t planned on, the beginning of the story simply coming to me. It’s been a couple weeks now, and I’m five chapters in, when typically by this time, I’d probably be a third or more done with the first draft. And yet, I feel no sorrow, no ache, no anxiety to finish.

Rather, I’ve had the thought of, “it will take the time it takes.” And, I’m allowing my brain to sit with the story, as I am only working on the writing two days a week, rather than daily. I don’t know where this will lead me, surely not on a bestseller list, but I do think it will allow me to be more intentional with this story, and to craft something more meaningful. Or perhaps not, and that is okay, I think.

The idea of not tracking in the past would have left me anxious and wondering, “how would I know how far I’ve come?” but now, it has me feeling more, “look how much time I’m giving myself.” It feels healing, almost spiritual, as if respecting time and letting it simply exist around me is less about what has been done in this hour, and more, what has this hour held. Rather than measuring life, I want to inhabit it.

Creativity demands time and incubation, a sense of forgetting about the specifics and letting the brain sharpen the blurry edges.
It’s something I’m trying new; I’ll let you know how it goes.

By: Rania Hanna

I think our society is shifting into conservation

4 Comments

I’m sick this weekend, battling a cold, and just a day before I felt the most sick, I was ravenous. I ate four meals, smaller ones, but more than I would normally consume, and I was starting to slow down in my energy levels. This is normal, as the body mounts an immune response (a metabolically expensive process), and focuses more on energy. Your appetite increases so your body can defend itself, and your body slows down so you conserve energy. Your body shifts from productivity to repair.

The following day, my body gave up, forcing me to take a day off of work. I had trouble sleeping the night before, and ended up dozing off into light naps.

Now, day three of my cold, and I have bursts of energy, but mostly feel like sitting or taking naps, and baking pita bread.

This has got me thinking: when a body is sick, it focuses on slowing down and nourishing itself. I wonder then, of a mind that is also sick with overstimulation and overconsumption. What happens to it?

I think that, it too, slows down and focuses on nourishing itself. I say this because I have noticed that the past few months, I’ve been returning to classics in my reading, craving depth and thought I hadn’t engaged with in a while. I’m seeking more to read to better understand the human condition, to learn, to “return to my roots” in a literary capacity. And, I’ve been focusing on slowing down.

Even in my writing, I am choosing not to push myself, my plots, or my timelines into something they don’t organically grow into. Last year, in 2025, I wrote almost six manuscripts (one I got about 80% of the way through before the new year came around). This year, I am working on editing them, focusing more on building on what I’ve already sown. And though I initially had plans to write at least two, maybe three, manuscripts this year, I have accepted that I may end up writing only one, and have begun to think that I may not write any at all.

This slowing down, both deliberate and organic, comes from shedding old skins last year. I moved on from some decisions I’d made earlier in life, even just years prior, and though I mourn them, I feel lighter without them, more like myself, and less like a shape I was trying to force myself into. That is, I feel more like I am wearing a skin I naturally fit into, rather than stretching out one that no longer fits me.

What I think is happening to my brain is a response to chronic overstimulation, a shift from productivity to repair, a sort of cognitive conservation. This makes sense, as when the brain sustains cognitive overload, i.e. “has too many tabs open,” working memory and decision-making reduce. It’s a sort of “sickness” that your brain decides it has to mount an immune response to, and so it shifts gears into restorative modes.

It’s why my brain has chosen classic literature or more “serious” works to read; it wants something that forces me to slow down because writing pace is slower, compels me to digest what I am reading, which forces me further to slow down. It’s a return to what is familiar and comfortable, and provides a stability as I often recognize what path a plot will take. It also reduces my task-switching: it’s difficult to “switch to another tab” when I’m digesting a thoughtful paragraph. This reading depth leads to sustained attention, which is further less stimulating since I’m focusing on one task, and one task alone.

And I’m seeing it elsewhere, too, not just in my reading. When I was younger, I could sit still, in silence, and enjoy it. The last few years, I have needed stimulation: an audiobook, a podcast, music, a YouTube video. Now, it’s almost as if I can’t stand the noise and stimulation, and instead want stillness and silence.

I’m not alone in this. I wrote in an earlier post “at least for a segment of our society, we desire simplicity and a reclamation of our human intelligence. It feels more like a quiet revolution, an unwinding of what our modern technology has wrought, reverting to less integrated and more simplified routines.“

What I mean to say with all this is as our minds and bodies desire healing from a society that is overwrought in pace, consumerism, and disconnection, I think our minds will begin responding in the same ways our bodies do when sick: by slowing down, digging deeper into our shared wisdom, and doing the things that nourish us. When a biological or psychological system is under strain, it moves to conserve, by simplifying and focusing on core functions.

And I think our society is shifting into conservation.

By: Rania Hanna

It’s been a while: world on fire, creative work, and upcoming comic

Leave a comment

Hi friends. It’s been a while.

Honestly, I haven’t had much energy lately to post much of anything, not the least of which a well-thought out blog post that’s worth sending out. Arguably, I don’t have the energy to write this one, but I’ll try to put down my thoughts regardless.

It’s been a horrible year. The world seems on fire, in some places, quite literally, including in Palestine/Israel, Syria, Turkey, California, Oregon, and other places. It seems the entire world is ablaze literally, and certainly, figuratively.

Palestine is under 22 months of siege, genocide, Israeli-engineered famine, and, as scholars are saying, a holocaust. Syria is under attack by Israel, including in Damascus and in southern Syria, where Druze populations are. Lebanon is precarious, with ongoing threats of attacks from Israel. Never mind our perilous situation in the United States, with Trump’s orders to send in the National Guard into DC, of which I saw groups of 3 or 5 roaming the National Mall and metro stations just two weekends ago.

It’s a scary time, and that’s not even going into the assaults on women, queer, Indigenous, Black, and other lives in America alone.

(BTW, there’s a bookish auction ongoing to raise funds for immigrant and trans rights, through August 27th).

With everything going on, I’ve continued to write, but I feel a bit…dead…inside, like I’m mostly a shell of a person right now. Creatively, I’m still doing work, but I can feel both body and mind slowing down, grieving, and, frankly, retracting, even as I try to reach out to people more. It’s a fine line between staying informed, trying to do work that can contribute to a healthy society, and protecting myself from the constant onslaught of horrible events. No wonder my recent Youtube watches have been on nomading through the US in a car, finding a couple acres to build a homestead on, and relaxing book recommendations coupled with homemade pastries and teas.

I have a few projects I’ve been working on, including a few novels, and one semi-memoir/social commentary on Arab-American discrimination and racism. They’re in different stages of creation, some I’m in the throes of edits for, others I’m still doing research for.

However, a short spread in a comic issue is coming out, a story on imperialism’s actions on collective memory and the rewriting of history. The story comes out in Planet Comics: Book Six, which you can back on Kickstarter. The work has hit full funding, but if you’d like a copy, feel free to back the project. It should come out in November-ish of this year.

Here’s a bit on my piece:

Rania Hanna (author of The Jinn Daughter), Erin Dodge and Ari Pluchinsky bring us the single-issue story, “The Archivist of Al-Azrakh”!

Sample page from “The Archivist of Al-Azrakh”

Signing off for now, and maybe for a while,
Rania