Week four has never been my favorite week of The Artist’s Way program because I generally take one look at the phrase reading depravation, wrinkle my nose, and whine: “Julia Cameron’s not the boss of me!”
To add insult to an already egregious injury, this time through the program week four happens to fall the week after Christmas when I have a fresh stack* of new books under the tree, muttering, “thanks for nothing, Cameron!”
Look, I’m not gonna lie to you. I’m already grumpy about all the reading I will NOT be doing this week. That said, I think focusing on the reading ban misses the point of week four’s focus.
Week four isn’t so much about not reading as it is about deeply reading ourselves. By removing the distraction of all those words we read in a week, we’re forced to pay more careful attention to the chasm between what we actually believe and what we think we should believe. Cameron calls this the difference between real and official feelings. Like slogging through those highbrow books the critics (and so many of your peers) say you should love instead of tearing through the books you actually love, say.
So week four is about zooming in our hearts and minds by cutting out unproductive distractions. But is reading really an unproductive distraction? In this day and age, Cameron herself admits it might be more productive to think of this challenge as more media deprivation than reading ban, which makes much more sense to me.
If I’m looking to cut out unproductive distractions, a week-long social media fast is going to be more productive than an outright reading ban. Though I don’t love the all-or-nothing implied in the word fast. For me, I think it’s more important to commit to a mindful media week. Instead of banning it all, I’ll endeavor to make a more conscious choice before I start to watch or read or listen. So that might mean I say YES to reading a novel excerpt from a fellow student in class but NO to scrolling through posts on social media. YES to working through goal setting for the upcoming year but NO to reading all the end-of-the-year roundups every publication feels compelled to publish this week. YES to reading the novel that stirs me and no to the novel I feel I should be reading.
Is this what Cameron intended? Not by a long shot. But given that she’s spent the first four weeks extolling the wisdom of tuning into my intuitive self, she can’t actually expect me to follow a reading ban just because she says I should when my gut is screaming at me to ditch social media for a week instead, right?
How about you?
*This shelfie has a few books turned backwards because those titles are research for the novel most likely to be my my next project, but I’m not ready to share that just yet, she said mysteriously…