Your Bedtime Story

During a long car ride, one of our children complained that their book had no plot. I wasn’t familiar with the story, so I asked how many pages had been read. The answer: twelve. Once our stories stop flowing the way we want, we like to jump in and control the process. We prefer skipping boring parts, tossing aside bad sections, and boosting the excitement. When we overmanage our stories, they turn out like this:

                                         https://youtu.be/bWwOWTkZydA

The video featured a perfect picture book with good doses of drama and purpose sped up and ruined.  We make that mistake with the stories we read and the story we live. We’d like to skip the mad-sad-bad parts of life and keep the rest, but the mixture formed, and continues to form, us. What sentence summarizes the plot of your life story?     

Adventure of a Lifetime

When’s the last time you visited a library? If you’re a student, maybe it was yesterday, but for too many of us, the library is a forgotten resource. Nowadays the Internet rules. Anything you want to know, along with things you don’t want to know, await you on the web.

I smiled this week after one of our kids, complaining that websites for a school term paper were useless, asked for actual books. Finally, somebody wants to visit a library. Sometimes the library is the place to go, and other times…well, take a look:

                                     https://youtu.be/fxOjfHFe1xY

It’s unlikely you’ll experience that type of situation, unless you live on a college campus or in an alternate universe. But if you plan to do any type of serious research, expect a library visit in your future.

In college, I remember visiting the library’s “stacks.” These were multiple, unoccupied floors of shelved books accessed by an elevator, and thankfully, a student I.D because the stacks were—in a word—scary. If I recall correctly, the lights were on timers attached to the end of the bookshelves. That placement only added to the fun of hunting down an ancient resource, especially after you forgot to reset the timer and found yourself in near darkness. But after braving the stacks, locating a particular work of literature from among the nearly two million other books felt like finding a treasure. Library memories (sigh). J    

Which habit or tradition do you still do, even though most people may find it “old school” or old out-dated?