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

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