I've finally crashed through a barrier. I finished reading the endings of several books I've had on the go for what seems like months, and it's a fantastic feeling to have finally done it. It was almost a psychological block. For some reason, I just wasn't able to finish them. But in the last few days without even thinking about it I found myself opening them at the bookmark, curling up somewhere and, one after the other, reading on until the last page. Pure joy.
One of them was the 'The Snow Geese' by William Fiennes, which is a book I had with me in one of my bags in the car all that time. Needless to say I wasn't in a state of mind to read much then, but I haven't been able to finish it since either, and I don't know why. I loved it from the start, for all sorts of reasons, one of them being the close-up-ness of the writing, he doesn't pan out much, he has the lens right up there, close to whatever he is describing. So if he writes about a woman in a long red coat wearing a black velvet cloche hat you see her standing there - very visual, you can 'see' everything he writes about as he travels halfway across the world following migrating geese to their nesting places and his own internal compass leading him back home. It wouldn't be for everyone, it's a very slow, quiet, but evocative, beautiful, beautiful book. Maybe it was because I had it in the car with me that finishing that one felt so momentous; it felt like I was finishing more than just the book, like I was finally drawing a line under things.
But the book I finished a couple of days ago: 'Eat Pray Love' (which curiously is also a travel book, of a sort) - and which definitely wasn't one of my favourites, her voice began to grate and it dragged on in places — is the one I keep thinking about. I woke up thinking about it this morning. Always just one thing she said at the end of the book about all the changes she has gone through by the book's end, how much she has grown as a person. And she said something which has stayed with me...About her growing as a person, she used the analogy of an acorn becoming an oak tree, and says the way she has come to see it there isn't just one force at work (the acorn pushing to become an oak tree) but two (also the oak tree being there already somewhere willing the acorn on to become the oaktree it already is - on some plane). She says, what if it's not just her younger, weaker self pushing on to become the stronger one she ended up as, but what if the woman she was always going to grow into was there already (somewhere) drawing her on to become her — The older you already there somewhere waiting for the younger you to push towards it. I may have got that idea a bit muddled - I've read a few other books in between — but it was something like that. And for some reason it felt like a powerful idea that I hadn't heard expressed like that before; and for some reason it stayed with me. So I thought I'd put it here. Because I woke up thinking of it again this morning: of the person you will finally become, being there already drawing you to become it. It's a strange idea to get your head around, but like words, what we imagine can be very powerful - and it's fun closing your eyes and imagining who that person you end up being might be — who you'd want them to be! And once you have an image of them in your mind to then push yourself to become that person that you end up being ('knowing' that they are there somewhere already drawing you to become them anyway) - walking towards them thought by thought, action by action, until you are the person you were always meant to be. Sorry...way too heavy for a blog. Rain is blowing across the windows here again.
