About this time last year there was a small thrift store near my house going out of business. This store unlike some of the larger “chain” thrift stores still maintained the secondhand vibe, having their goods piled onto miscellaneous shelves where gems could still be found and they hadn’t had their prices researched on the internet before display.
I loved to search through their shelves to redeem books from someone’s dead grandmother’s collection that had spanned decades, but had been discarded by the back door after her death. I have found many a great title among these shelves. Once I found an old Hemingway that had some obscure CIA agent’s business card tucked away in its pages. I say obscure, because I couldn’t find anything about him on the internet, but I’m guessing the CIA may keep their agents on a low profile basis. This store is also where I found the book Outrageous Kasimir, but that is another story all together.
So, when this store was going out of business they began selling all of their books for 50 cents apiece and I never know when I will get an aching for a particular read so I loaded up on books. I just couldn’t help myself with them being so cheap, so I wasn’t too particular about the subject matter and just sort of went for covers that took my fancy.
Now, a year later and just a few days ago I was thinking about picking back up my “Atlas Shrugged” book after a particularly long rest from its pages. A rest because, I see my reading as a another avenue for growth and change so I allow my intuition to take control and put down books or begin reading new ones according to how I feel, and may be reading four or five different books at the same time, gleaning a bigger lesson from the books as a whole.
This is one of my syncing things that I have always done and never really called it syncing. I just follow my gut and when I have an answer that I am searching for I stop searching and just open my eyes up and have had bizarre experiences. I will put a book down and then after a few days pick it back up and the very next paragraph will be about something I just read in another book, magazine, or had seen in a movie or television show, hence the continuation of the practice.
So, I had it in my head after putting my boys to bed that I would be reading in a different book than my current read and I walked into my living room and found a book on the couch that one of the children must have removed from the side table shelf. It was one of those 50 cent books I spoke about. The title was “The Soul’s Sincere Desire” by Glenn Clark. The oddest of things was that on the first page of the book, which is blank had handwritten P42-48 at the top right hand corner with the very edge of the page above it cut out. 42 resonating on the first page made my interest perk up and I instantly knew that I would be reading this book. Ayn Rand was quickly forgotten as I began flipping through the pages….
encompassingchaos 