Want a Richer Life? Turn Off the News and Wake Up to the Real
What Dickens, Henry James, and one small bird taught me about paying attention
It was a stunning day in Central Park.
Cherry blossoms flared in full bloom, their fragrance drifting sweetly through the air as my wife and I strolled beneath them. We were in New York City to surprise my son, who’d traveled east on a field trip with his eighth-grade class. It was my first visit to the city, and our walk through Central Park felt magical.
Horse-drawn carriages ferried tourists under the bright sun as we ambled down the Literary Walk, past statues of Shakespeare, Sir Walter Scott, Robert Burns, and Fitz-Greene Halleck. Deeper in the park, in a wooded area, we paused on a bench.
A flash of red caught the corner of my eye.
Turning, I spied a male cardinal perched on a branch. A California native, I had never seen one before. I fumbled with my phone but managed only a blurry shot as he flew off. Still, the sight stayed with me. I realized the only reason I noticed him at all was because, for a moment, I was present.
That encounter planted a seed.
The better way
The trip to New York was years ago, when my son was still a boy and I was serving as a police chief. My days were filled with commitments, obligations, and distractions. Some distractions, I’ll admit, were self-inflicted.
Namely, the news.
I was a news junkie. Papers, magazines, cable channels. CNN or Fox News blared in the background most evenings, their anchors interrupting one another in endless cycles of commentary.
My wife would retreat with a novel to escape the noise, while I was all too willing to get pulled into the fray.
But after that trip, after that cardinal, I began to sense a better way to spend my time. As a landscape painter, I already knew the restorative glory of slowing down in nature. Yet the grind of work and the lure of news cycles always pulled me back.
Somehow that bright flash of red awakened me, nudging me to reconsider what deserved my attention. I found myself more often in my wife’s backyard garden, reading books and poetry.
In the serenity and peace.
Pleasure and depth
These days, I meet every Wednesday with a group of retired friends. We talk about our families, our health, and inevitably, the news. One afternoon, I launched into a little speech:
“I’ve given up on cable news! All those commercials, the overhyped ‘breaking news’ that isn’t news, the endless speculation. Twenty minutes with the paper on my iPad tells me what I need to know. I don’t need a day’s worth of hyperventilating anchors chattering about nothing.”
The men laughed, but what I wanted to tell them was this: I’d found something better.
Books.
Not just escape, but pleasure and depth. Novels that transport me into other lives, where I can learn, grow, laugh, cry, and glimpse the deeper mysteries of being human.
Cable news never did that for me.
The demands of depth
I’m now immersed in a creative writing MFA program, my days filled with Dickens, James, Dostoevsky, Flannery O’Connor, and others whose wisdom both humbles and challenges me.
To be honest, some days aren’t fun. I reread James’s dense passages of Victorian society. I look up unfamiliar words and historical allusions. I wrestle with metaphors and recurring themes.
But the effort sharpens me.
Focus, retention, and comprehension all grow with use. And the reward feels like the satisfaction after a hard workout: demanding, but worth it.
Mornings with Isabel Archer in The Portrait of a Lady ask more of me than dozing through Good Morning America. Afternoons with Aquinas stretch me in ways cable chatter never could.
Dickens’s satire of the Circumlocution Office in Little Dorrit feels eerily like our own age of bureaucratic noise and 24-hour headlines. These books remind me that deep reading trains us not just for the page but for life itself.
Because reading good literature doesn’t only entertain, it teaches us to notice.
Go get a library card
We all need escape.
A Netflix series, a favorite film, even the occasional news headline. But don’t stop there. Go get a library card. Reacquaint yourself with the classics. Yes, explore contemporary novels too, but don’t ignore the voices that have endured for centuries.
Great writers like William Shakespeare, Leo Tolstoy, George Eliot, and the Brontë sisters saw deeply. They wrestled with the same demons and dilemmas we face today. Their stories carry hard-won wisdom, if only we’ll slow down long enough to receive it.
Read deeply.
Nourish your mind and soul with old stories. The focus they demand will sharpen your attention in daily life. You’ll see people more clearly, perhaps more kindly. You’ll walk slower. You’ll notice more.
And maybe, when a flash of red alights on a branch, you won’t reach for your phone.
You’ll already be awake to the real.
(An essay from jpweiss.com)
Before you go
John Patrick Weiss writes stories and essays about life, often illustrated with his black and white photography. Visit JohnPatrickWeiss.com.
