If Your Tears Must Be Stolen, Let the Thief Be a Book
If your tears, sighs, laughter, and breath must be stolen, let the thief be a book that tells a thousand stories of love, adventure, suspense, and feelings; all wrapped up in poems that burst with emotion.
Books build us up, bring us closer to hundreds of realities that we couldn’t even imagine. Because reading is more than just a simple pleasure that helps us to embrace our imagination and understand reality. Reading gives us the gift of freedom, helps us to manage our worries, and submerges us into the narrative sea, as if we were fish that knew all of its hidden depths.
It’s worth it to cry, laugh, and dream, when a book is responsible. Because thanks to books, we understand the beauty of rainy afternoons lying on the sofa, living the mysterious adventure of a life that is not ours.
“Of all of man’s instruments, the most amazing is, without a doubt, the book. The rest are extensions of man’s body. The microscope, the telescope, they’re extensions of sight; the telephone is an extension of voice; and then we have the plow and the sword, extensions of the arm. But the book is another thing entirely: the book is an extension of memory and imagination.”
-Jorge Luis Borges-
The pleasures of reading are infinite
Feelings like sadness, anger, worry, and anxiety, are all alleviated when you read a great book. All of our feelings and emotions can be soothed through reading, because it brings us closer to self-knowledge.
Have you ever felt identified with the words or the characters of a novel? Have you ever thought, this book has described how I feel, everything I’m thinking, so well?
Reading is a great source of inspiration and reflection. It has the amazing ability to show us new horizons full of questions and answers that we’d never even considered before.
Reading allows you to be whatever you want: a king, a seagull, a clown, a vagabond…whatever it may be. Because through the words of a book, we can turn feelings into thousands of realities.
Through reading good books, we put our thoughts, beliefs, and feelings in order. Little by little, we can untangle a web that seemed messy and knotted, but that hid a great symmetry within itself.
Reading makes us smile; explore our interests, ambitions, reasoning, and emotions; get to know ourselves better; and overcome the barriers that we impose upon ourselves.
Books fill our minds with wonderful ideas that give meaning to our lives. They give us new interests and take up hours of pleasure by allowing us to escape the drama of daily life.
Through reading, you can forget your problems, alleviate stress and worries, give yourself space, learn, think more creatively, and strengthen yourself emotionally. You can even find the answers to your problems, or at least learn how to confront them better.
Reading benefits our physical and emotional health, as it helps prevent the development of diseases like Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s. It also helps us to put ourselves in other people’s shoes and understand them better, or in other words, to work on our empathy and emotional intelligence.
On top of all these health benefits, reading a good book is a unique experience, a spectacular treatment with no side effects. Books have the capacity to give a voice to our emotions, to show us what it’s like to be in love, to enrich our dreams, and to save our lives.
It’s worth it to feel pain if the one who made you feel pain is a book, because it gives you a kingdom to reign over. Through reading, we can learn without limits, and become aware of and take refuge in our thirst for knowledge. And as such, with every page, we become a better version of ourselves.