You know this sound – the opening of a brand-new book.
Few things in life carry as much acceptance and peace as the act of opening a book, new or not. For me, the smell of print ink has become the symbol of wisdom. The crackling of the spine bending is a love song equivalent to that of a nightingale. The feel of the pages under fingertips is as soothing as moss after rain.
Maybe you’re like me, or maybe not, but when I read a book, I handle it as if it were a holy soul and the most fragile of beings out there.
I don’t underline, highlight, or write on margins. I have an aversion to bent corners on pages. And I have only carefully selected bookmarks which I try to match to the book in hopes they’ll like each other.
Whenever I have done the contrary – who knows why? – I feel as if I’ve violated a divine creature; as if I’ve exposed the book to pain it does not deserve.
Make no mistake, I do take notes, highlight important passages, and write down ideas. But instead of doing all that on the pages, I use post-its, scrap paper, and I journal as I read.
The book, however, treats me quite the opposite.
It leaves notes on my margins, highlights certain stories, and underlines passages I have forgotten I had. In addition, it leaves a whole bunch of new ideas in every blank space it finds.
When we’re done, the book is just as new. I, however, have morphed into someone else – with more flexible covers, more important pages earmarked, and spine softened by the world I hadn’t experienced before.
The more I think about it, the more I realize that our interactions with the world are a lot like our interactions with books, whether you write on the pages or not.
Everyone and everything approaches us with a proverbial pen and highlighter, leaving their marks on the pages of our lives.
Events and people highlight some parts of us, scratch out others, and sometimes they help rip out scary pages; sometimes they add a few.
Thus, the world around us is constantly in the process of writing the story of us.
When it comes to actual books, even if we haven’t written any books ourselves, we realize that great ideas do not originate from our brains, but from some other place. Every great idea I’ve ever had has been a surprise to me and has manifested itself from the depths of something that’s difficult to explain. Sure, we write those ideas down, but it’s as if we act as middlemen and not the creators.
I know, this is an old concept. Many authors and artists before me have already stated it, more than once. Elizabeth Gilbert talks about it in her book Big Magic and calls ideas ethereal beings who approach us and ask for permission for collaboration.
So, what’s your point, Eva? Here it is:
Just as an author writes down a story (idea) through a quantum field into a book, the quantum field writes down a story (life) through experience into a body.
Just as the stories on paper are of divine energy, so are the stories on human bodies. While the former is written down by a writer through a pen, the latter is written down by source energy through experiences we encounter in our lives.
Honor those stories, all of them.
Photo by Taisiia Shestopal on Unsplash. Thank you!