THE CATCHER IN THE RYE
Author: JD Salinger
Total Pages: 214
Total approximate words: 75,000
Making a living is exhausting! Making a dream come true is equally or perhaps much more exhausting, but also exhilarating, liberating, empowering, and at the end of the day satisfying. I am no more in the pursuit of the later, for whatever reasons. Well to be honest, the reasons are, greed, impatience, lack of perseverance, and a huge fear of failure. Hence after a ‘sabbatical’ of almost eighteen months I am back in the game of what some might call the ‘rat race’. It might not be as satisfying as living the dream I am sure, but people do envy how far ahead you are from them in the race. Yea yea, one might say it is a toxic sense of accomplishment, but nevertheless it is still an accomplishment. In this whole pursuit of meaningless approval, it is important to keep some time aside for something that truly lights up your soul, makes you smile, and makes everything else obsolete, while you are at it. In simple English, it is called a hobby. From my amateur attempt in sounding lucid, you may have figured it out already what is it that I gain pleasure from.
Writing, and of course reading.
Since my return to this ‘rat race’, I have not written down anything that had to do anything with my love for fiction-writing, and the battle with the passing months to complete my goal of reading 12 books (one for each month of the year) is getting tougher and tougher with each passing day.
THE CATCHER IN THE RYE, is the 9th book I finally finished this year, shamefully in more than a hundred sittings probably. I kind of knew this, but experienced it upfront that the longer you take to finish reading a book, the less interesting it gets! The charm of storytelling is lost if the author is interrupted again and again! The opportunity to experience a whole new world is lost, because I had to keep going to work, to make a living, to get some sort of meaningless approval from some imaginary crowd, to stay ahead in the rat race! Honestly, I don’t like it. Some say adulting is a series of making a lot of hard decisions, decisions that might not even make us happy after making them, but apparently that’s what stupid life is!
As impossible as it may seem, still, make sure you don’t get lost in this whirlpool of adulting, and take some time out every now and then from your stubborn ‘work-life’ and do the small/big things that makes every other thing in the world obsolete when you are doing it. What I am saying is, get a hobby, and if possible, stubbornly immerse yourself in it.
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