It is … a way of exposing one’s ceaseless growth, the dynamic self that has yet to be. The infinite player does not expect only to be amused by surprise, but to be transformed by it, for surprise does not alter some abstract past, but one’s own personal past.*
James Carse

Once inside the imagination all manner of inexplicable things occur. Time gets loopy, the past presses itself against the present, and the future pours out its secrets.**
Nick Cave

It certainly isn’t always so,
But sometimes,
When I am reading,
I slip out of chronos time
with all of its linearity,
Into kairos time
with its significant, transformative
moments.
In these times,
What the author wrote and
what I read
generates something new
in me
that I must share.

If a reader cannot create a nook along with the writer, the book will never come to life.^

*James Carse’s Finite and Infinite Games;
**Nick Cave’s The Red Hand Files: #156;
^Madeleine L’Engle’s Walking on Water.

Some of my favourite reads from this year:

Awestruck (Jonah Paquette)
Benedictus (John O’Donohue)
Building and Dwelling (Richard Sennett)
Sacred Earth, Sacred Soul (Philip Newell)
Almost Everything (Anne Lamott)
Four Thousand Weeks (Oliver Burkeman)
The Art of Self Improvement (Anna Katharina Schaffner)
Several short sentences on writing (Verlyn Klinkenborg)
Figuring (Maria Popova)
The Hero’s Journey (Stephen Gilligan and Robert Dilts)
From Strength to Strength (Arthur Brooks)
Hero On a Mission (Donald Miller)
Atomic Habits (James Clear)
Grit (Angela Duckworth)
Life Is In the Transitions (Bruce Feiler)