Wise words

It seemed that Alexander McCall Smith found me instead of my finding him. Or rather his book found me. 

Where: Bookstore at Suvarnabhumi Airport, Bangkok, Thailand

When:Around 10pm local time

I had finished the book I was carrying in hand and was looking for something else to read. I also had some small change in Thai Baht to release, since coins would not be accepted for foreign exchange. Having read and thoroughly enjoyed his earlier book "The No 1 Ladies' Detective Agency", I picked up "The Forgotten Affairs of Youth" and promptly set out to read it. 

What resulted was a pleasant, albeit long drawn journey into the beauty of simplicity. Aside from the story featuring a Isabel Dalhousie, a lovable philospoher-writer, the book was peppered with quotable quotes on life, most of them so simple but so bang on that I wondered more than once why it had not struck me! Here are a few gems:

Self doubt was a luxury, as perhaps, was the examined life. And yet the examined life, as the adage had it, was the only life worth living. 

Don't write - or say - any more than you have to. Just don't.

Beauty - whether in nature, in art, or in music - was always ready to do its work; all we had to do was to open our hearts to it. 

And I suppose that at the end of the day things are the way they are and we just have to accept them.

A Poem, by A A Milne, the creator of Winnie the Pooh, the Hundred Acre Wood and all the characters in it:

If Rabbit were bigger

And stronger than Tigger

Then Tigger's bad habit

Of bouncing on Rabbit

Would matter no longer

If Rabbit were stronger

I'm quite capable of tossing caution to the winds. It makes such an exhilarating sound, when you toss caution into the wind. It's a sort of whooshing.. 

There would be quite enough guilt in the future; being human, we all had our share, except for those who never felt guilty about anything because they had no idea why they should.

It was an exciting time, obviously. Everything was so fresh, so challenging. To be eighteen again!

- And to know, at eighteen, what one knows now.

That's what we all are at heart: love-struck teenagers. And every so often the love-struck teenager within emerged to remind us that love is quite as capable of turning our world upside down as it ever was.