A Bargain - the Best I Ever Had

I went for a walk this evening and found myself at the neighborhood thrift store. Aside from low prices, one reason I like this place is because some of the best bargains are hiding in plain sight. This is a metaphor for life, of course, and I reflect on it each time I find a great Large size sweater among the Smalls. Or a CD I've been wanting to hear stuffed in with the cookbooks. Think outside the parameters, advise the wise folk. Stay open to the possibility that good things can come from unexpected sources.

And, I get to pat myself on the back for due diligence on finding a deal.

One thing bothered me, though, as I walked home. Browsing the book section, I'd become quietly agitated. This feeling crops up often in bookstores. It usually happens when I'm not searching for any particular title or topic, but am looking for something new to read. I've always wondered why.

One thing is obvious: there sure is a lot of second rate stuff out there. Third rate too. (I'm talking non-fiction, by the way. I don't have the focus and patience that most novels seem to require.) I can understand an author and publisher wanting their time in the sun, but really - how many trees need to die for yet another volume of Chicken Soup for the Soul?

Really, though, the crux of my agitation is that the search for the "right book" is often a vain attempt to soothe the loneliness of being human. You could say the same for any type of shopping when there's not a specific need to fill. Many of us have spent strangely unfulfilling afternoons at the mall, trying to ease the emptiness or boredom we so often feel.

The kind of books I look for have the potential to deliver more than clothing, cars, drugs, and other distractions from the human condition. They come to us with the premise of education and expansion. And because we give so much authority and weight to the printed word, we expect a lot from these books. They contain thousands of thoughts that somebody went to a lot of trouble to arrange on the page, hopefully in some order that makes sense to our personal predicaments. And, they require a sustained investment of attention on our part. So when a book doesn't pay off for me, I feel especially disappointed.

Perhaps I sense that many authors write from a high-altitude perspective – from a conceptual rather than experiential viewpoint, as William Bridges puts it. He's the author of a well-known book from the 70s called Transitions: Making Sense of Life's Changes. When his wife died about ten years ago from breast cancer, it threw him into a tailspin the likes of which he'd never known. "How could I ever have tried to pass myself off as an expert on transition?" he wondered in a later book. "I felt now that my words had totally failed to match in depth the experience of being in transition."

Ah, authenticity. Honesty! That's what pulls me into a book: confessions that confirm we're all lost and confused together. Bridges goes on to describe how he worked through feelings of being an imposter, whose readers and clients would now see through his charade and resent his ill-gotten reputation. Captivated by his admission, I felt less lonely. His transparency erased the artificial separation created not only by his authority, but by the mass medium of publishing. Momentarily at least, I felt re-connected – to myself, to him, and to humanity, whose every member has a story of suffering and confusion.

You know that melty feeling you get when somebody shares his or her deep truth? That's gratitude for ya. There's how we think things "should" be, and how they really are. I'm far more interested in the latter.


*Quote above from Bridges' The Way of Transition: Embracing Life's Most Difficult Moments.