If by ‘economy of language’ you also mean lack of transition paragraphs, I see your point. Please be advised any sentence could be punctuated at any moment so you can be reminded that lives are at stake.
The nonchalance of your intersectionality, that’s what I want to always remember; how your letters carry the comforting chords of a familiar friend and then shift with the adrenaline surge of an assigning editor. The pace is serious, like I mentioned – it’s how you moved – not a moment to lose.
And with that, here’s a case brief for your briefcase (ahhh … inside pun!)
I’ve been assigned the task of looking into the mystery and finding the story about what caused me to stop reading circa my second grade year. Ironically, I was reading and found a pretty good lead: “Writing and reading decrease our sense of isolation. They deepen and widen and expand our sense of life; they feed our soul,” Anne Lamott wrote in Bird by Bird.
When I stopped reading I lost connection to hope and possibility. Yes, I still read, thanks to school mostly, but my spontaneous movement toward reading was paralyzed. What did the Enemy want to steal? My freedom to believe, the safety to linger and listen; what I love about reading is how the voices we discern from diction seem to stir heartbeats of words already planted in our soul. We grow deeper and wider, as dreams and truth mingle within us. That’s what I lost, that’s what went dormant. I stopped going within and started looking out, to the world, to find what I could become. Small win for the Enemy.
God is faithful, though, and eventually He led me back to reading when I was at a dead end with writing. I stumbled, and God patiently waited. I cried out in distress, and God heard and answered with unusual havens and unexpected graces, such as the elementary understanding that if I wanted to write better, I needed to read more.
The story is about search and rescue, about seeking only to find out we’ve already been saved and then the actual quest begins. One of the blessings is that I am wiser to the Enemy’s tactics, and I want to help others, especially the young ones, not drift so aimlessly on Leviathan’s seas. Because what I believe, at least for me, is that reading is rest, and reading is resistance. Reading revives our inner being, and calls on the Voice within us, which never tires or grows weary but is always ready to speak if only we will be still, linger, and listen.
