Making Space to Seek
Written by Kathryn Evans Heim
I began attending Well-Read Mom meetings a little more than six years ago. At the time, I was contentedly single and had just entered my 30s. I was not actively pursuing marriage or family. Still, the friend who invited me to the group assured me it wasn’t “just for moms.” Upon looking at the year’s book list, my heart fluttered with interest.
Some of the books I had already read but were favorites worth re-reading, some books I had heard of but never had a chance to read before, and some were unfamiliar but seemed intriguing. Though I was an English/Creative Writing major in college and have been a lifelong reader and writer, I had never belonged to a book club before. However, I was nearly a decade post-college and craved not only the stimulation of good discussions but also the guidance about what books were actually worth reading.
Earlier that same year, I had begun deleting my social media accounts after recognizing the detrimental effect they had on my mental health and also my productivity as a writer. With the banishment of Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, and finally, my beloved Pinterest, I found myself with more time on my hands and more space in my brain to take in new ideas and relationships. Without the emotional load of checking the status updates of so many “Friends,” I had the energy to get to know new people, both the women in the book club and the characters in the books. For the first time in years, I found myself being filled instead of drained because I was experiencing real encounters instead of the fleeting, yet somehow still overwhelming, images and thoughts on a screen.
The author Neil Gaiman has said that “the thing that fiction does is build empathy… Empathy is a tool for building people into groups, for allowing us to function as more than self-obsessed individuals.” He also specifies that while movies and TV shows allow us to view another’s life from the outside, books allow us to become another person for a time, to see the world through their eyes. Social media is much like movies because we only see the end result of a production, while in-person encounters allow you to enter immediately into the life and mind of the other person like a book does.
“The thing fiction does is to build empathy… Empathy is a tool for building people into groups, for allowing us to function as more than self-obsessed individuals.”
Neil Gaiman
Reading the same books together also gives people common experiences and a common language with which to communicate and facilitate broader discussions. It builds a culture and community, which so many of us lack in these days of physical isolation that has resulted not only from the crisis of the last few years but also from so much of life migrating to the digital world.
In the time since I first began attending the Well-Read Mom meetings, I also began my first serious dating relationship, navigated the global pandemic, moved towns, got engaged, planned a wedding, moved again, began my new married life, and lost my mother to cancer. It’s been a turbulent few years, but the WRM community became my anchor. For the whole year I was planning my wedding, I drove an hour one-way every month to discuss books and soak up the wisdom and experience of the other women in our group. Though our discussions always centered on the books, that very fact assured us that we were discussing real life and what it means to be a daughter/wife/mother/friend. The openness with which the women of our group shared their own experiences, struggles, and joys was among the greatest gifts I received leading up to my wedding and marriage.
Last year, the Year of the Giver, I finally started a new local WRM group. Though still navigating my first year of marriage, I wanted to be able to share the gift of these books with my new community. In the end, the group ended up being a gift to me, as the women that I met through the group became a major support for me while my mother fought a very brief battle with cancer and then passed away right before Holy Week. As we journey through the Year of the Seeker, I find myself seeking and finding more than I expected.
As I’ve walked through grief this year, I’ve intentionally narrowed my life even further than I had before, prioritizing my energy for my relationship with God, my husband, and my siblings and their children. I’ve taken refuge in books like never before, and they have given me words for the emotions and experiences that sometimes feel too big to capture in real life.
Charis’ story and navigation of loss hit almost too close to home. Yet, in the end, it gave me more consolation and hope than I would have thought possible as I worked to navigate my own loss. My husband read Dracula along with me, and the example of Jonathan and Mina Harker (and how amazing Mina is generally) was an ongoing topic of conversation for weeks and a time of intellectual bonding for us. Finally, as I went into my first Advent and Christmas without my mother, Brother Lawrence and The Practice of the Presence of God gave me the simplicity and spiritual grounding that I so desperately needed.
Many events in life can shake us out of routine complacency and force us to reprioritize what we give our attention to, but we must also intentionally make space to consider what is worth prioritizing in the first place. In order to find, sometimes we need to think about what we are seeking.
About Kathryn Evans Heim
Kathryn Evans Heim is an author and wife living outside Salisbury, NC, where she gardens, raises chickens, experiments with cooking, and reads too many books. Find her work at www.evanswriting.com.
About Well-Read Mom
In Well-Read Mom, women read more and read well. Our hope is to deepen the awareness of meaning hidden in each woman’s daily life. We long to elevate the cultural conversation and revitalize reading literature from books. If you would like us to help you select worthy reading material, we invite you to join and read along. We are better together! For information on how to start or join a Well-Read Mom group visit our website wellreadmom.com
