Book Attachments

  Attachment is such a pervasive thing, and it's important to be honest in one's attachments. I have discovered, for example, that whenever I am in a library, I experience the kind of anxiety that besets many a book lover, namely the fear of not being able to finish all the books in the library! It's interesting to reflect on why this fear even comes up in a person's life, but I suspect that for me, it has to do with the complicated relationship I have developed over the years to book and reading.
    Books for me, as far as I can remember, have represented the window into other people and other beings' lives. I believe that reading is one of the most crucial forms of socialization because they can induct a person into the level of critical reflection required to "read" the world and to question it at its foundations. There is a double edged sword here, of course, and that is that too much reading can sometimes lead a person to stop trusting their own thoughts, ideas, or even their own awareness. The words of someone else can quite easily substitute for a more direct personal insight into the ways of things. Sometimes a very neat and compelling theory found in a book can obscure the process of seeing by preventing a person from being able to frame their experiences in multiple ways. Rather than being an exhortation to reject books per see, perhaps this is more of an invitation to move into spaces that are not bounded by words.
   A classic example might be the case of everyday paradox. I often come across situations where I am trying to make decisions about what to do or how to resolve an issue, only to find myself split "right in the middle" and not really able to move forward at all. Searching through books, one might find a model that most comfortably moves a person in the direction of one way or the other. More often, however, these frameworks only serve to repress certain sides of a story in order to advance another side. What would it be like to simply stand in the middle and to fully engage the tension? Here, I am reflecting that the greatest anxiety for people in this middle is twofold. First, such a paradoxical ambivalence is rarely spoken in clear words. Second, ambivalence threatens the self with a sense of uncertainty that can seem painfully annihilating. But again, such times of uncertainty are actually veiled invitations to go deeper and further into a non-self state, where there are no clear boundaries between one person and another, and yet the other cannot be "absorbed" into the self or its knowledge.