The Court, The Coach, and The Codex: A Lesson in Being Over Consuming

When I was 13, a coach from the local travel basketball team invited me to join his roster for a weekend tournament in the next county over. I jumped at the opportunity.

My parents weren't around that weekend, so I asked my coach for a ride. Truthfully, I thought the other players would try to catch a ride with him. You could probably guess at the knot in my stomach when I realized after he had picked me up, we headed straight for the freeway. I expected a quiet, focused 45-minute drive. Rather, he initiated a conversation and, through it, sowed a seed in my soul, implanting an idea that, even a decade later, I still can't shake.

He started talking about all the starters, position by position. When we got to the shooting guard, there was a pause. There’s a depth to my coach: when he’s silent, you can almost hear the heaviness of his thoughts crystallizing before delivery. The pause, replete with reflection, became deafening. He spoke:

"The thing about Jack is that he's not one to try a new move after seeing it on TV. He just consumes."

The comment struck me with a raw punch of clarity, awakening me to the realization that our lives are shaped not just by what we take in but by what we do with it.

It took over a decade to see that his comment had nothing to do with basketball and everything to do with life.

The idea seized me. My starting point: reading.

When we choose to read only to escape the life we live, our point of failure starts at the end of the book. In doing so, the best parts of ourselves remain unrealized; we choose only to consume rather than become.

A single book can result from a writer’s lifetime pursuit of knowledge, an intimate conversation between an author's mind and our own, inked on a page to imprint on our future.

I don't want the ideas in books to be merely interesting, I want them to be invigorating.

Reading for more than escape offers the opportunity to let words move you and, more importantly, be moved.