This morning reading On Becoming a Person by Carl Rogers I was amused to read:

“… if I can form a helping relationship to myself—if I can be sensitively aware of and acceptant toward my own feelings—then the likelihood is great that I can form a helping relationship toward another.”

Rogers himself prefaces this statement with the phrase: “One way of putting this which may seem strange to you is that….” But for me it seemed a bit of a convergence between him and a recent insight I expressed here (see “a small insight for an old musician“). I was pointing out that if I try to support and validate other people’s musical actions, it might behoove me to do so for myself as well. This and trying to be as kind and accepting to myself as I try to be to others make up a sort of “helping relationship to myself.”

In this same chapter, Rogers comments that the “locus of evaluation, the center of responsibility lies” within the self.

I didn’t read Rogers at the beach yesterday. I took a bag of books. By the time we decided to leave I realized that I had read a bit in each book. This is my pattern. This is one reason real books help me a bit more than ebooks. I can forget I am reading something if it’s tucked away in a etablet but if the physical book is present I am more likely to remember I am slowly reading it. I picked up this habit years ago when I read an essayist who pointed out that if one read a few pages a day in a book eventually one will have made it all the way through it.

Here’s my beach reading from yesterday and the page number I reached sitting on the sand.

left off at page 162 of 222.

Left off at page 145 of 197.

These stories are mind boggling. I read in its entirety the fifth one in the book yesterday, “Memories We Lost” by Lidudumalingani at page 81 of 292.

I am on chapter three in this book, “Seeing Through Words: an Introduction to Basho, Haiku and the Suppleness of Image” I discovered that this chapter seems to have been published at least as a separate Kindle “single” ebook.

Left off at page 82 of 300.

Left off on page 224 of 606 but I read more in my ebook copy this morning laying in bed.

Left off on page 222 of 388. I might put this one down. Robinson doesn’t have much to say to me and Le Guin writes rings around him.

I offer these in the spirit of my own curiosity about other people’s reading. A woman was sitting at a picnic bench reading a book yesterday that suspiciously like It’s Even Worse Than It Looks. I didn’t have the courage to strike up a conversation but was curious.