Reading is the process of gently breaking yourself: eroding dogma, undermining opinion, fracturing certainty. It’s a continual process of renewal: evaluating the things that we are sure are true, against new evidence that our certainty maybe unfounded, leaving us with the choice of growth, or stagnation. It’s an aggregated activity: we may not read one page that changes us, but the pages, in aggregate, change us immeasurably. If we are open to the opportunity.
Time to read is seen as a luxury, a flower broken by the storm. The first thing we lose under pressure is discretionary time, and yet without this investment in ourselves, we are destined, forever, to be ourselves. To deny the opportunity to become the person who we have the potential to be. To grow is to thrive. If we lose ourselves in the busyness of the everyday, we are simply surviving. Perhaps, as Social Leaders, this is our purpose: to create spaces for others to thrive.
julianstodd
Julian Stodd's Learning Blog 
Julian, you are, as usual, RIGHT ON TIME! Happy New Year!
Julian, thanks again for your post. This time, I’d like to quibble with your graphic. I’m reading your blog post, on my PC. That’s not a hard-cover book. It’s a constantly expanding text, where each post is a page or a chapter. I think that the visual emphasis on traditional books (which I value) lessens the important opportunity to discover ideas every day from our personal learning networks and Internet libraries. If you do another version, I encourage you to build this in.