Books.

As the train was rolling steadily along its tracks I experienced the full range of emotions from laughing loudly to sobbing. My fellow travellers gazed regularly in my direction and I wondered if they thought I was not normal.

But what good is a book if the story does not engage you and entrall, lure you into its depth and allows you to feel. Feel as if you are the storyteller yourself.

These is My Words by Nancy Turner.

I lived the life of Sarah Prine as she told her story in her diary through the years from being a settler during unsettling times of cowboys and Indians to being an Officer's wife and running her own ranch in the territory. These clumsy lines, written by an uneducated child becoming a studied woman.

Yup. I liked the book.

So books.

I was reminded that lives are changing and our perception, our views, our world are constant and ever evolving elements throughout time. My Kindle was tugged away in my bag because My Words was not available for Kindle, so instead I had to add the bookweight to my luggage. One of these things I will always happily do because a nice companion on a long journey cannot be weighed up in grams or ounces.

I cannot imagine life without books.

And I am certainly one who hasn't often picked up a book over then past many many years except for those relating to my work whether this was in technology companies yonks ago or those about my passion and present work, holistic health and laughter, joy and communication.

The cult classic Fahrenheit 451 is a dystopian novel by Ray Bradbury published in 1953 sprung to my mind as I was thinking of books and their impact. The novel presents a future American society where books are outlawed and so-called "firemen" burn any that are found.

Well, it's a job just like any other. Good work with lots of variety. Monday, we burn Miller; Tuesday, Tolstoy; Wednesday, Walt Whitman; Friday, Faulkner; and Saturday and Sunday, Schopenhauer and Sartre. We burn them to ashes and then burn the ashes. That's our official motto.

Fahrenheit 451 - the temperature at which books burn!

The people who have formed the resistance to this atrocity memorise one book each and become that particular story.

So much information is available every moment of every day and sometimes it blurs our view of what is in fact true and false. The information posted on the internet is written by people and sometimes twisted to suit whoever wrote it - just like it is with any journalistic representation. We engage our minds in other people's lives via blogs and real-time messages.

Pick up a fictional novel from time to time. It really clears the mind in a wonderful way when you open a book on the first page and prepare yourself for the journey. Clears the mind to be ready for the world of the author who ransacked his mind to come up with lines of enchantment or perhaps it just flowed into a captivating story.

Honestly, take time out.
Whether it's with a book or just being sat on a tree stump pondering...

No pressure, just leisure!