serendipity

I used to have this 'skill' whereby I would go into a bookshop and pick out a book, flip it open randomly and, often, immediately read something applicable to my life. I haven't tried it much lately so I'm not sure if I still can. It is so tempting to put this down to some universal energy, or 'grace', as M. Scott peck might put it. More likely it is just that at any moment there is a rather large amount going on in my life, combined with the usual capacity (which everyone has in order to understand horoscopes) to personalize even vague text.

Mr. Peck in his analysis of grace points to the amazing fact that people survive even the most horrific car crashes as well as pointing to how we are able to often narrowly avoid death. He forgets that most of this can be explained statistically and through the fact that we are viewing our lives from the perspective of having survived. Anything at the long end of a causal chain will seem almost miraculous. It doesn't make it a result of 'grace'. Which isn't to say such a thing doesn't exist, only that Mr. Peck (at least in the one book I have read: The road less travelled) falls woefully short in the part attempt to explain it rationally.

Anyway, I am finding some wonderfully relevant stuff in the book I'm reading (the Aguero Sisters by Cristina Garcia). Here are some snippets:

''all evil begins with the first absence." -- And I have been thinking about what prompts some of the 'evil' in my thoughts.

"[I leave] the oppression of possibility." -- Fantastic. This is just what I've been feeling. All these people I have been meeting (the women particulary!), all the new sites in Thailand -- all give you the strong of possiblity. But it can feel oppressive. Especially if, for various reasons (CFS symptoms, self-confidence, knowldege of future consequnces) you feel restricted from taking advantage of them.

"expecting privledges I thought automaticaly came with risk." -- Perfect. How ridiculous humans are sometimes.

"Tranquility is nothing more than the good ordering of the mind." -- Recently I've suddenly suffured from indecision again. It is a incredibly distrubing state of mind. I wish I could remember the Aldous Huxley quote. Something about happiness just being a state of vigirous mental health, towards which meditation should be directed (and not to mystical experiance -- this must have been before the 60's!).

"Don't women understand that their peculiarites are what endear them to men? Rarely do the most conventionally beautiful women have the greatest hold over their mates." -- and, I've been thinking about this tension in me and in society. Our desires are in a large part delineated by the media (of course there is a dialectic) but at the same time we do not fall in love with, and to a dgreee, cannot fall in love with (since they hardly exist), perfect looking people. For those who cannot love the flaws in someone, loneliness beckons. But for many, perhaps, there is this gnawing sense of having accepted second best. How sad. And how boring a homogenously 'beautiful' people would be anyway. There is more to be said on this but I have to go...