Books that kept me sane

Books have always been my favorite place to hide. When everything went wrong, I picked up some fiction and got transported to another world. My real world problems got buried in somebody else's adventures. This was how my mind worked until the pandemic struck. In March 2020, when we were thrown into a world of uncertainty, I could hardly focus on any fiction. Suddenly life seemed like a medical thriller and I wanted something that would make me feel like I am a living, breathing human being and not somebody else's figment of imagination.

After getting stuck in every book I tried to read, I found three books that comforted me and encouraged me to be a better human being. Reading these books felt like having a conversation with an old, wise friend - conversation that changes the way one sees the world. These books are going to be life long companions for me. In all these months, when I thought I couldn’t make it to the next day, I picked one of these books and found the solace I needed. I hope you also find comfort in these books.

All About Love By Bell Hooks

“Our Confusion about what we mean when we use the word “ Love” is the source of our difficulty in loving.

Don’t mistake this one for “Men are from Mars and Women are from Venus” kind of books. I would personally come and haunt you if you categorize Bell Hooks like that.

In an interview, Bell Hooks has jokingly said that she is like a mad woman who always goes on and on about love. In a world where we are ridiculed and belittled for our vulnerability, it takes great courage to talk about love. And greater courage to actually love in the right way. But what is the right way? Have you ever wondered? Our definition of love is as muddled as our notion about it.

This book goes deep and wide. Bell Hooks unravels every layer of our relationships and makes us understand how our notions about love were developed. It takes great effort to learn about love and may be more effort to unlearn what we thought as love.

When we cannot be sure of how the next day is going to unfold, the only thing we can do is to be a little more loving. It has opened up my heart in a way I never thought I could.

“ I try daily to learn to leave folks as though we might never be meeting again. This practice makes us change how we talk and interact. It is a way to live consciously”

A Field Guide to Getting Lost By Rebecca Solnit

“There are those who receive as birthright an adequate or at least unquestioned sense of self and those who set out to reinvent themselves, for survival or for satisfaction, and travel far. Some people inherit values and practices as a house they inhabit; some of us have to burn down the house, find our own ground, build from scratch, even as a psychological metamorphosis.”

One of my resolution for 2020 was to embrace uncertainty with equanimity. Now just the thought of it makes me laugh at myself.

This is an year where we faced losses of different kind and at the same time we are trying to navigate through a world which is completely new to us. What better way than to read the map Solnit sketches for navigating through uncertainty! This is part memoir, part history and about the unbreakable links Solnit establishes between these two. Nobody can write non fiction like Solnit does. Period!

“For it is not, after all, really a question about whether you can know the unknown, arrive in it, but how to go about looking for it, how to travel”

Upstream By Mary Oliver

“I stood willingly and gladly in the characters of everything — other people, trees, clouds. And this is what I learned : that the world’s otherness is antidote to confusion, that standing with this otherness — the beauty and the mystery of the world, out in the fields or deep inside books — can re-dignify the worst-strung heart”

Mary Oliver has been comforting me with her poems for the past two years. I never expected her essays would have a greater impact on me than her poems. Here she surprised me again — One cannot box her love for this world and its beings in only a particular form. Her love and compassion would always be an overflowing fountain. If we could imbibe even half the wisdom in her words, we would turn out to be better human beings and the world will be a better place.

“In this universe we are given two gifts : the ability to love, and the ability to ask questions. Which are, at the same time, the fires that warm us and the fires that scorch us”