reading is a passion and a pleasure for me. i’m drawn to it. i can’t imagine a world without words, without exposure to new ideas and new thoughts both profound and mundane.

i’ve read many a good book and shared few. it’s not that i guard them jealously, it’s simply that in my circle of friends and family, i’m an anomaly. my friends are not readers. even my parents, who enjoy good books and recommend their reads to me regularly, are not as voracious as i. 

our genre preferences also don’t match.

when i was a child, time spent not reading was time wasted as far as i was concerned. i’ve mellowed some and come up for air when engrossed in a book more often, but i still give them large chunks of my time. finishing a book a day is not unusual for me. i read fiction and non-fiction, poetry and prose, ranging from seriously literary to sheer escapism.

i read an excerpt from “beachcombing at miramar” by Richard Bode this past spring and it thrilled me so much that nothing would satisfy but a copy of my own. it’s breathtaking, an autobiographical exploration of the meaning of life and how the author came to find his truth.

towards the end of the book i came across a passage so utterly perfect, i felt compelled to share:

“The events of my life are like the rolling of the waves, the changing of the tide, the shifting of the wind – they contain no judgment. My parents’ death was not a tragedy, my marriage not a mistake, my career not a miscalculation. They were the course of my days, the pattern of my years, the flow of the life that was given to me, and the way I lived it.”

this is a more balanced approach than the one i unthinkingly employ, which is to look back with shame, judgment, and self-criticism. i’m going to post this where i can see it and read it often. it will remind me that life is a journey and there’s no right way to get where i’m going because the trip is about learning to be me.

---