Learning to slow down.

This weekend, Ryan and I visited his parents in Fort Myers while his aunt & uncle were in town from New York. We had a lot of down time, and I forgot my laptop at home so no GRE studying was going to happen (ohhh, darn). After scanning through Pinterest over and over and over again, I decided to open up my iBooks app and finally get down to reading Dark Places, a book written by Gillian Flynn (Gone Girl, duh).

It's a relatively captivating book. Creepy, very dark (ha, puns)...almost the kind of story I don't like to read at night because it's basically nightmare food. Anyway, while I was reading over the weekend, I noticed that I could feel my eyes glazing over long paragraphs of descriptive words meant to "paint a picture of the scene," and found myself skipping right to the dialogue. Cutting to the chase, if you will. Literally glancing over three or four lines, assuming I got the gist, I would move on to the next paragraph, hardly internalizing what I'd just read.

I then realized that this is something I do this almost all the time, in every aspect of my life. I assume I'll "get the gist of it." Whether it's putting together an IKEA dresser, or looking over an apartment lease, or practicing reading comprehension for the GRE. In a nutshell: I suck. And I suck because I'm constantly "on to the next." I want to finish this book so I can start a new one, I want to finish this set of reading comprehension questions so I can move on to the shift sentences, I want to hurry up and find a new apartment so I can start moving out of my old one.

On the whole, I need to take a chill pill.

Does anyone else have this issue? I feel like I'm wishing time away, trying to start the next phase of my life. Or in this case, the next book. Side note: any book recommendations?