I am an easy going person. I make space for a lot of people in my life, people who are entirely different from me, younger, older, working professionals, stay-at-home moms, readers, artists, runners – all kinds.
With most people, I listen more than I talk. I hold back, I don’t open up, I say what I think would make them comfortable, I try to find similarities, I make connections.
For years, many of my offline acquaintances didn’t know I liked to read, even though reading has always been a huge part of my life. Many of them, even now, don’t know that I write and blog.
That said, there’s a whole other kind of happiness in finding your kind of people. Specially readers.
For now, let me just talk about the joy of finding fellow readers who read like I do.
Readers who enjoy diving deep into a book. Who turn up with a book full of annotations, with Post-its sticking out of the pages, lines highlighted and underlined, copious comments in the margins. Someone who like me, after reading a particularly good book, has gone online and read multiple reviews, who has stalked and listened to the author and collected a bunch of crazy, wholly unnecessary trivia.
Someone who wants to know what the author meant by that one sentence; who reads interviews after finishing the book; who looks up the location; who holds opinions about minor characters most people don’t even remember.
Now that – that’s an absolute delight.
Sometimes, when I go on and on about a book, my sister tells me I have thought more about it that the author herself. Or when I’m ranting about a book-related thing she says, ‘Why are you so touchy about it?’
Naturally I argue right back, telling her to deal with it, to accept it as a quirk or whatever (that’s what sisters are for, after all). But I do wonder: Am I overthinking? Am I excessive? Does it really matter that much?
But then along comes a book-friend who feels exactly the same way, is equally excessive, loves more deeply and rants even harder, and then I think, maybe I’m not so weird after all.
I feel I fit. That dear friends is a wonderful feeling.
I realise this isn’t really about books at all.
My marathoner BIL, for instance, tells me he uses shoes that cost Rs 25K (or more) and have to be discarded after a run or two (True fact). He pays a few lakhs to enter the Boston Marathon (or one of the others) simply for the privilege of running with a bunch of people (on his own two feet, mind you!) He carries his quinoa khichdi when we go on a wet windy trip to the mountains, while we tuck into onion pakodis.
I think he’s weird.
But put him among his running friends and none of this is weird. It is accepted, even inspiring.
That’s what communities do. They give us context. They make the things that seem excessive to everyone else, feel perfectly reasonable.
To be passionate about anything is to be a little weird.
That’s not to say naysayers aren’t valuable. They’re the ones who help you keep perspective, who tell you Aur bhi gham hain zamane me (insert passion) ke sivay :-).
We need those people.
But we also need people who understand why that particular book, that particular run, that particular hobby, that particular thing matters so much to us.
The people who don’t make us explain ourselves.
The people who make us go, ‘Oh, you too?’
That’s why we need communities.
That’s what keeps us going.
(Photo by Viktoria Alipatova on Pexels)