It’s been a while since I have written a Reset Sunday…my apologies; I’m back at it now. For today’s Reset column I wanted to mention a thing or two about how Sundays are the perfect “reading day”. You aren’t, after all supposed to do any writing…you are “resetting” right? But you can still read which is what I plan to do for a good part of today.
Yesterday I started keeping track of the food I eat and the activities I do for the purpose of weight loss. (stay with me…I have a point) I am discovering quite a few really disturbing things about my own habits. For instance, I snack (or graze as they call it which makes me feel sort of like a cow) a lot. I have to stop that. I don’t drink enough water…I have to fix that. And, perhaps the most disturbing of them all, I watch way too much television. I didn’t think I did, I mean I write all day long and knock off at 5 or 6 in the evening but then I have dinner and sit down in front of the idiot tube telling myself that I am “spending time with the family”. On Saturdays I knock off work at 3. So yesterday I sat down in front of the television to watch some movies with the family and I didn’t go to bed until 11 p.m. Can anyone tell me how long that is in front of the television…please raise your hands…you, there in the back with the funny hat on…what’s that? Yep, you are correct, that’s 8 HOURS!
I was shocked. 8 hours of mindless TV. I could have been doing anything else at all but there I was, snack in hand, sitting like a lump in my easy chair contributing to my early demise. It was quite the wake-up call. I hadn’t always watched television like that. I use to read more, get out of the house more, play more but at some point, over the last 10 years I had migrated into that easy chair.
So I said all of that to say this….don’t watch television today….read, then get up and do something, then read some more, then get up and do something. We as writers sit all the time anyways so more sitting time in front of the television can’t be good. And once we give up our souls to television replacing reading we are giving up our imagination, our will to create story in our minds and our sense of self replacing it with the lives of actors. So today….pick up a book and turn off the television; this is your Reset Sunday mission. Who knows maybe you will once again discover the joys of books and find that it is much easier to put down that remote control.
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