27 March 2011

Today was awesome because I started reading one of my favourite books again.

As many people do, I go back and revisit my favourite books from time to time, like you do an old friend.  And from within the familiar pages of my beloved hardcovers and paperbacks, such as The Count of Monte Cristo, 1984, and The Princess Bride, I always manage to come across a passage, phrasing, or quotation that feels new.  Perhaps I was a little tired and my eyes were heavy the last time I was on these particular pages and the words barely registered... maybe my emotional or mental state is different than the last time I read the book in question and words that never jumped out at me before now make so much sense... or it could be that I've started relating to a character I never identified with before.

Discovering wonderful "new" bits to the books I adore is always exciting, but what I love most is reaching the moments that I love most.  When Edmond Dantes first meets the Abbé Faria while wrongfully exiled and imprisoned in the Chateau D'If.  When Julia slips Winston a piece of paper and he unfolds it to discover the words, "I LOVE YOU."  When, after listening to Vizzini proclaim several accomplished feats to have been "inconceivable!" Inigo finally comes to the conclusion, "You keep on using that word.  I do not think it means, what you think it means."

My favourite travel/lifestyle/philosophy book is "Vagabonding: An Uncommon Guide to the Art of Long-Term World Travel" by Rolf Potts.  From cover to cover it is full of the most brilliant advice, anecdotes, profiles of people like Jack Kerouac, Walt Whitman, and Henry David Thoreau, and the most inspiring, thought-provoking, soul-searching quotations by them and many other of the world's greatest writers, thinkers, philosophers, and travelers.

I love this book.  I LOVE this book.  I've read it and re-read it so many times.  I've bought extra copies and given them out as gifts to friends whom I thought could use the inspiration, or sometimes, just because I wanted them to understand me a little bit more. (Many years ago, I even wrote a short recommendation for the book that was published on the Matador Network and can still be found there today.)

When my ukulele and other belongings arrived from Nelson, BC last week, Vagabonding was among the most prized possessions to return.  I never travel anywhere without it, always pulling it out of my rucksack for an extra boost of energy on the road or to share the wisdom of its' contents with kindred spirits (or doubters) I meet along my way.

Tonight, as I picked up the book to continue reading, it flipped open to a random page and my thumb happened to land on a wonderful thought that I'd like to share with whomever may be reading this:

It is easy in the world to live after the

world's opinion; it is easy in solitude to

live after your own; but the great man is

he who in the midst of the crowd keeps

with perfect sweetness the independence

of solitude.

-Ralph Waldo Emerson, "Self-Reliance"

(from Vagabonding by Rolf Potts, Villard Books, 2003)

(What made your day awesome?  Tell me in the comments section below.  Reading it will be one more awesome part of my day!)

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