Something happened to me in my adult life, especially the last decade, where I can’t seem to get enough information. The more I learn, the more content, fulfilled, at peace, I seem to be.
As a child I avoided reading like the plague. The weekly “bookmobile” to our school was the one thing I looked forward to the least while attending Catholic school. Think about that – the many church services, religion classes, and strict nuns paled in comparison to the anticipation of the dread I faced every Friday when we were expected to check out one book from the bookmobile and do a book report. My reading comprehension, for reasons I understand now, was quite poor. I was in the lowest reading group in my class which would make me feel dumb and I carried this feeling with me all throughout my life. (I will say I learned to skim quite well and I became a very good test-taker.) Until I had children.
I jokingly say my kids got their dad’s brains but at one time I really believed this. It wasn’t until I started paying attention to what my kids were learning in school that I too began truly learning. It started with interest in what they were being taught in (Montessori) school and evolved as I started reading and actually comprehending what I read. I also had a very VERY smart friend at the time who is a voracious reader whom became a huge inspiration.
So about 10 years ago I really started reading books. Then Kindle. And then I discovered Audible and started listening. And now in addition to Audible I’ve discovered podcasts. So far my podcast experience is pretty limited because I listen to books on Audible so much but I came upon one podcast in particular that I love – Criminal. I found it by Googling “best podcasts”.
Criminal is not what you might expect. Even now when I read a description of it, I think it is so much more than just “true crime”. When I read the description I even considered skipping it. I mean reading about crime in my spare time just didn’t seem very appealing. Boy am I glad I still gave it a try!
Once I found the podcast I then Googled their best episodes and listened to them one by one.
I’ll stay with my practice of not sharing too much here so you can have your own experience, but to give you a good idea what kind of podcast this is and to show (hopefully) what I mean when I say the description is a bit misleading, I suggest you listen to episode #33. Here are the episodes suggested as their best but my guess is they are all good: 51, 11, 58, 94, 47, 85, 61, 1, 33, 95
And oh by the way, each episode is around 30 minutes long. Perfect for commutes. Enjoy!
PS Producers of Criminal have a new podcast which I may look into next called This is Love.
