My Life As a Bookshelf

As we go through life, sooner or later we face the question about our existence and what we have learned from it. I am sure we all have our stories and theories of what life is about and moreover, there is no right or wrong from it, since it’s a matter of perception.

Today, I ponder about what have being my life and what popped into my mind, was a big bookshelf full of books, bookends and decorations.

No, I don’t mean this from the fact that I love to read books, but from the wisdom I got while filling my bookshelf (life/human body) with books (knowledge) through my entire life. The way I see how we start life as a bookshelf, start through birth, with an empty new bookshelf. As we grow up, we start our first book  from recognizing our parent’s faces and voices, to simple commands of how to behave among others. That first year of life turns into the first book in our bookshelf, full of experiences and emotions, that we soon mastered it, moving on to acquire more books.

As we go through life, we acquire books on subjects like family, honor, values, religion, love, marriage, divorce, sadness, friendship, betrayal, abuse, among many others. We get books from self help to dramatic novels, from which some of us tend to live the drama over and over, making it part of our lives as an extension of us.

Sometimes, we allow others to wonder in our bookshelf. We even share our books or give them away,  or perhaps we read passages from our books to others, thinking that they might need the knowledge more than us. Sometimes we show our bookshelf to others, bragging about what we have, in which most cases, is full of books that we started but never finished. Some of us, put doors with keys on our bookshelf, thinking that we can keep our books guarded from others, while others put glass doors into it, like telling you  that you can see but you can’t touch.

As years pass, we either take care of our life’s bookshelf by giving it a fixing upper of varnish, add odd colors to it, adding/ taking shelves from it, expanding up or sideways or perhaps just shining its surface with oils.

On the sad side, some of us, often forget to take care of the bookshelf by becoming busy reading one book over and over, consequently allowing dust and bugs to be rambling around our bookshelf and into the rest of our books.  Then we give a good look at it and we choose of either clean it or have others to clean it for us. Some just stop reading books and abandon the bookshelf, thinking that its not worth it to keep on with it.

Looking at the books in my life’s bookshelf, I see all sizes, from thick to thin books. Some have colorful covers, while others are dark. Some look new, others showing signs of years pass. Some have bookmarks with colorful tassels or a bended page, to remind me to go back to it, when needed. Some of the book I started them with lots of enthusiasm putting it quick to the side, to wonder in other books, soon forgetting to finish what I started or what I have learned so far.

At one point or another, we start to organize on our books and after remembering what we have learned from certain category of books, we decided to add a bookend.

Sometimes we use those bookends to change our whole outlook in life and consequently we start acquire books with subjects new to us, starting a new collection of books. As the bookshelf gets old and its shelves cave in with the weight of the books we have acquired, we start wondering, what we can do with it. As everything in life, we have choices… we can give away and share our books to release the weight on the shelves, or we can start fill some of its shelves with decorations instead of books, to remind us the simple things of life that give us joy.

I have faced my bookshelf today and have noticed all the books, bookends and decorations in it, some of them I am proud of it, some of them not so…I am cleaning it up the best I can, shaping it to match my higher self.  I know for certain, that when my bookshelf stop to exist in this lifetime… all the knowledge and experience I got from its books, I am taking it with me… because is what makes me who I am…

I am sure that in the next life, I will have a new bookshelf and will continue getting more books…

Love and Light Everyone!