What I’ll be doing for the Next 2,400 Hours of My Life

There’s a great Rumi quote that has really been bothering me lately.

“Yesterday I was clever, so I wanted to change the world. Today I am wise, so I am changing myself.” — Rumi

As a 22 year-old recent college graduate, I have been struggling a lot with the transition from the world of big dreams and endless possibilities (i.e. the shining hilltop that bequeathed me with my quarter million dollar degree) and the world of rent, paychecks, grocery shopping and general Grind. I think most of us started feeling this crippling sense of tradeoff during our last year of college, the sense that “I know how I want to change the world, but I can’t do it right now, so I’m going to do something that gives me Skills instead, but just for now.”

That’s right, Skills. That meaningless marker of “the next hoop” we have to jump through on the road to eventually being able to do the meaningful work we long for. Even though I like my job, my company, and the people I work with/for, I am the victim of a melancholic restlessness that whispers perpetually in my subconscious, this is not what you were meant to do.

After moving thousands of miles away from everything I knew and loved not just once but twice, these murmurs knock the wind out of me. They force me to realize that everything I’ve worked so hard for here; community, sense of place, friendship, belonging, it’s all temporary. It may be real, but that doesn’t make it any less fleeting. I realized today that there will likely be a moment in the distant future when I’m sitting around with old friends and one of them says, “Do you remember when you lived in Sacramento?” and I’ll reply, surprised, “I always forget about that, it feels like that was another life.” That’s my right now. I’m living in a reality that I can only imagine will one day be utterly forgettable.

So, given this grotesque sense of living in expired time, the sense that I’m not doing what I’m meant to doing (at least partially because I don’t know precisely what that is), this sense that I desperately want to have a positive impact on the world not when I’m 30 but now, I’ve decided to take Rumi’s words to heart. Maybe I can calm my melancholy restlessness with a little wisdom (or at least feigned wisdom, fake it till you make it, right?).

I’ve been thinking long and hard about how I want to change myself, and I’ve cycled through hundreds of ideas of challenges and projects that would force me to confront my weakness and build on my strengths. I want to do something that is genuinely difficult, that will force me to change the way I’m living my life, physically, mentally, and emotionally. And yesterday, I decided how.

Those who have ever discussed books with me have probably heard me say something along the lines of, “If I spent half as much time reading books as I do picking them out, I would be the best read person I know.” Well, Sarah, it’s time to pay the piper.

So here’s the challenge. I have 2,400 hours, exactly 100 days starting from 10:30pm on December the 17th, 2015, to read 100 books. And I’m not talking about novellas or essays or magazines. Full length books. Books I’ve been meaning to read, authors whose lives intrigue me, books I’ve never heard of.

By my calculations (based mostly on my own word/minute average and the average number of pages in the first ten books on the list), this will require me to devote a little more than 25% of my total weekly hours to reading (~40 hours a week). (I know, for someone who loves reading, I’m slow.) It will cut into sleeping, eating, and all kinds leisure activities. I am (sort of, technically) an adult with a full-time job, so 8 hours a day, 5 days a week are generally dedicated. All the other hours are fair game.

To be honest, this might suck. It seems highly unlikely, but there is a possibility that this challenge could make me hate reading. But I know that right now, I feel pretty lost, and I know that giving over a big part of my life for the next 100 days to a single goal will have an impact on my understanding of my self, my choices, and the world. The likes of Carl Sagan, Mark Twain, Michael Pollan, J.K. Rowling, J.M. Coetzee, Malcolm Gladwell, Jhumpa Lahiri, and Bill Bryson have brought ecstatic learning to my life before, so in the next 2,400 hours, I am going to embark on a spiritually literary pilgrimage to commune with my gurus.

Since this journey may require my falling off the face of the planet socially, I will, at the completion of each book, be writing a post here (fair warning, it may be as short as 10 words).

As a preview, book 1 (which should be finished in the next few hours)is Death by Black Hole: and Other Cosmic Quandries, by Neil deGrasse Tyson.

Additionally, I am accepting recommendations on good reads, specifically because of anything mentioned above or because you loved them and you think I will too. If you have read a book and always wanted someone to talk to about it, let me know. I will read it. Then I will talk to you about it.

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