Fiction matters!!!
When someone says reading fiction has no benefits, do not pay this cliché any heed, because for me characters formed by pure imagination have been more inspiring than anything I have experienced in real life.
In books you get the choice, you pick the characters and in reality choice picks you. And I would like to be in a place where I have more power over what influences me and my disposition.
The character that gave me the power or I’d rather say an opportunity to look at life and myself from a different perspective was a girl, from a young adult romance novel, suffering from cancer. And no she wasn’t debilitated but her thoughts were confined to the outcomes and side effects of death. I am talking about Hazel Grace Lancaster.
I know we have read enough about introverted, socially awkward book-nerds kind of protagonists. But Hazel is different she is mellow yet fierce, shy yet confident. She doesn’t worry about inane things. She doesn’t care about leaving a mark because seriously what’s the point? She never sought attention from a room full of people she barely knew. It didn’t matter how many people wanted her as long as she had few whom she cherished.
She didn’t worry about picking up on new things or jam packing her ‘to-read list’, she read the same book over and over just because she loved it and she wanted to. She cared for quality, not for quantity of life. And she found the quality in little things. There’s this line in the book that says ‘she wasn’t loved widely but she was loved deeply isn’t that more than most of us get? ’ Which is true because these days we are all running after numbers, crowds and fandoms, meanwhile distancing those who truly care for us.
We have no idea how to be satisfied with less. Hazel found infinities in less. This was all because she was smart and she accepted the fact that life is not an endless flowing river, it’s a lake and eventually she will reach the other end. Just because none of us have cancer it doesn’t mean that our life is not a lake. We are very similar to her, as long as we are aware of transience of life, we can tame the present like she did. Totally unbothered by the future yet very aware of its reality.
