Honestly, I love when you form a habit that you enjoy and at the same time it improves your life organically. It’s a great thing to see how small changes can gradually have a profound impact on your well-being.

So, what habit do I have that contributes to a better quality of life?

Reading is probably the most important daily habit I’ve formed from childhood to the present that impacts my life the greatest. How else would I know what the word cacophony means? I would have missed the child-bonding experience of going to the bookstore at midnight with my teen daughter to pick up Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. When I needed it most, I would have missed reading Philippians 4:5-6. Staying up reading The Black Stallion by flashlight in my bed as a child, breathless as Alec Ramsey is first rescued from a shipwreck and then tames the Arabian horse and eventually enters “The Black” as the mystery horse in a match race against champions Cyclone & Sun Raider.

Pure joy. That is what reading is to me.

So, what would happen if I lost the ability to read?

Actually, that happened for about 2 weeks or so about five years ago. One evening, I’d been trimming trees in the backyard (foolishly without protective glasses over my eyes), and I ended that night with what felt like a small piece of wood in my eye. I couldn’t help rubbing it, pulling my eyelashes and blinking, and everything else I could think of to clear the foreign object from my eye.

Surprisingly, the next morning, I woke up and the itchiness and the sense there was something in my eye was fully gone. It wasn’t until a month later, while driving home from the gym, that I realized the extent of damage that was done. While navigating down the street, my vision in that eye suddenly went all snowy, like that television screen in Poltergeist when Carol Anne found out that “they’re here”.

Fortunately, I happened to be near my eye doctor’s office, so I pulled in and had them look at the issue, which ended up being a tear on my retina. I had surgery the next morning to fix the tear, but in order to keep the retina in place, they injected a gas bubble into my eye that when lying face down held the repaired retina in place at the back of my eye.

So, how does a person keep the gas bubble floating at the back of the eye? It’s simple. For two weeks straight, you spend 45-50 minutes of every hour lying face down. Who doesn’t love sleeping on their stomach all night, right? Nothing worse than when you wake up in the middle of the night flat on your back and just know you’re going to go blind!

You might wonder how this detour story to my vision issues ties to today’s prompt question. Well, during my recovery, whenever I wanted to “read” a book, it ended up being an audio version on Spotify while lying face down in the living room, the bedroom, the family room, wherever.

The lesson from that experience? Wear protective glasses over your eyes, and always remember you don’t know what you’ve got until it’s gone. It’s something worth protecting, your quality of life.

Be blessed, be safe and have a great rest of your day!

YOUTUBE SONG OF THE DAY