Why I Read

Come read with me — quietly, slowly, deeply

I read because I love what happens in my mind when I do.
The way a good line stretches something inside me.
The way a new idea opens a small window.
The way questions arrive, and then better questions after them.

Not the thin, rushed thinking that scrolls headlines and reacts before my body has even caught up.
The older kind.
The kind that sits still for a moment and asks why.

Out here on the farm, I see something every day that I used to miss in the city:
Nothing grows because I want it to
— or because I apply tools, techniques, willpower and effort to make it.

Plants don’t care how urgent my to-do list is.
They grow when the ground is right.
They take what they need from season, soil, water, weather — and they refuse to be rushed.

It’s the same with us.
Our minds don’t deepen because we stuff them with more information.
They deepen when we give them good ground: time, attention, real questions, and the willingness to be changed.

Old questions in a fast world

On the surface, almost everything about our world has changed.
We carry more power in a phone than my parents had in an entire office.
We move money with a tap.
We work, shop, speak, and scroll at a speed that would have felt impossible a generation ago.

But underneath, the human questions haven’t moved an inch.

How should we live?
What is good?
What do we do with fear, love, power, loss?
What makes a life worth the cost of living?

We keep inventing new tools and new language — and then circling back to the same old questions.
Sometimes we pretend they’re new.
Mostly, we try not to look at them closely.

Why the old books

That’s why I read the old books.
Not because I’m nostalgic for another era.
Not because I think “back then” was better — it wasn’t.
The world has always been on fire somewhere.

I read them because if an old idea has survived plagues, wars, empires, revolutions, and entire shifts in how we understand the universe, it might be more trustworthy than whatever went viral this week.

Old wisdom is not a museum piece.
It’s field notes from people who were every bit as human as we are — afraid, hopeful, stubborn, tender — trying to work out how to live with courage and conscience in the middle of their own chaos.

The home that taught me to think

I was given what I still believe is the world’s greatest advantage:
not money or status, but a home where thinking was allowed to take up space.

My parents were children of immigrants who left Holland in a time of turbulence and began again in a new country.
They built small businesses from almost nothing.
They read widely.
They argued, out loud, about faith, politcs, ethics, meaning.

They didn’t always get it right — nobody does — but they took ideas seriously.

My father read The Great Books of the Western World twice over.
When my mother passed at ninety-two, the volume on love was still open beside her bed.

It took me decades to notice something painfully simple: I hadn’t read them like that.
Not with that kind of steady, lived attention.

How this shapes my work now

I work with people whose lives are cracking at the edges — through illness, burnout, grief, transition, the sheer strain of trying to be “okay” in a world that won’t slow down.
I watch them ask, in their own words, the same questions those old writers faced.

If I’m going to walk with people through that kind of season, I don’t want my only references to be last year’s self-help trends and whatever else is passing through my feed this week.
I want deeper roots than that.

For myself.
For my daughter.
For the people who sit across me when everything familiar has stopped working.

So this Reading Journey — this Conversations series — is not a side project.
It’s part of my work.
It’s how I keep my own compass alive while I’m helping others find theirs.

What this Reading Journey will be

When I pick up Plato, or Aristotle, or Marcus Aurelius, or Gibran, I’m not reading to collect quotes.
I’m holding their words up against a real Thursday in 2025: a muddy farm track, medical emails, load-shedding, bank balances, the sound of swallows, the weight of choices that don’t come with guarantees.

I’m asking:

Does this still hold?
If it does, what would it ask of a life like mine — and of the people I serve?
If it doesn’t, why not? What’s changed in us, and what hasn’t?

Because old questions, honestly faced, might save us from having to repeat quite so many of our newer mistakes.

I read so that when someone comes to me on the edge of their own becoming —tired, frightened, done with performing — I’m drawing from more than my latest clever thought.
I’m drawing from a deeper river.

An invitation

If that sounds like something you need too —
company in the questions, not neat answers — you’re welcome to come along.

I’ll read.
I’ll think out loud.
I’ll show you where these old ideas cut true, and where they collide with the life I’m actually living.

You bring your own questions, your own story, your own good mind.

Let’s see what still holds.

— Jo