If you graduated High School or university between the late 1970s and early 90s at least one of these books was thrust into your hands to “help plan your life” and “make the right choice” along the way:
- Simple Abundance – Sarah Ban Breathnach (1995)
- A Purpose Drive Life – Rick Warren (2002)
- Who Moved my cheese? – Spencer Johnson (1998)
- The Road Less Travelled – M. Scott Peck (1978)
- People Of The Lie – M. Scott Peck (1983)
- The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People – Stephen R. Covey (1989)
- Men Are From Mars, Women From Venus – John Grey (1992)
I read them all when they first came out and was left questioning my entire life, my choice of career, values, goals, and felt utterly hopeless. I couldn’t identify with the books, nor could I figure out how on earth to integrate them into my life, especially into my conservative upbringing. The questions that haunted me as I ploughed through the pages were “Am I stupid or was I born in the wrong part of the world?” I tried, believe me I tried several times to reacquaint myself with the books over time and time again but ended up shoving them all to the darkest region of the bookshelf where I could not easily find them or even reach them. I ignored them on purpose and voluntarily forgot them.
It is only now in my late 50s that I look back and realise that the mistake was that they fell into my hands at the wrong time in my life. I was young, single and fresh out of university for some of them, and none of the topics were a reality to me yet. What 21-year old has found their passion and purpose in life? Highly effective people? I barely survived my teens, how was I supposed to figure out what an effective or ineffective person was? All of these books require life experience, both good and bad, and can only truly be appreciated from your mid-40s onwards, or even better, on the onset of your midlife crossroad (it is no longer PC to call it crisis).
The book I had the most trouble with was Rick Warren’s A Purpose Driven Life and I even got hold of the workbook to try and figure it out. Alas, it was a fruitless effort and I all but burned the book. The irony of it all is that my entire coaching business and philosophy is now built upon this premise – to live a purpose-driven life in your silver and golden years. So if you stumble across this book (or set of books now), never give them to anyone under the age of 35, because they are still sowing their seeds in the fields of life, making their mistakes, and learning the valuable lessons they will need in order to fully appreciate the book. In other words, they haven’t fully lived their life yet!
The same goes with Sarah Ban Breathnach’s Simple Abundance. I absolutely love this book now in my post-menopausal age, but it was given to me before I turned 30 and all I wanted at the time was a highly intricate, active, ambitious life that was materialistically abundant. Once again, the irony of this book in my life now is that it took becoming a recluse and detaching from all the clutter in my life to even understand the title. There is nothing easy about achieving simplicity in life, and it is even more difficult to embrace spiritual abundance over material.
M. Scott Peck’s The Road Less Travelled was given to me a year after graduating from university and I had just started in development work, so certain chapters made an impact. But I knew there was something missing within that prevented me from fully connecting to the book or the points that M. Scott Peck was driving at. There were life situations that I had yet to experience, so whilst I read it with fascination and even underlined many a passage, it remained theoretical until I got myself entangled in all the complications he brings up. By that time I didn’t want to listen to Peck’s solutions anymore!
The point of all this is that sometimes we run into books and movies that we failed to understand at a certain time in our life simply because we were too young. It has nothing to do with chronological age, but the youth of inexperience that prevents you from seeing the darker part of your soul and emotions.
There are so many things we learned during the academic years, and perhaps even more during all your corporate trainings and post-graduate studies, but it is the school of life that teaches the most valuable lessons, and the best example of this is the book All I Really Need To Know I Learned In Kindergarten by Robert Fulghum. If there was a book you struggled with back then, even if it was literature or philosophy, and swore never to read again because it made no sense (e.g. The Plague by Albert Camus, The Greatest Salesman in The World by Og Mandino, The Pilgrim by Paolo Coelho, Great Expectations by Charles Dickens, The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas, and last but not least, Walden by Henry David Thoreau), and you are over 45 now, I strongly recommend revisiting them. You no longer have to read them as a reluctant student or bored patient in the waiting room – but through the soul of an adult who has finally lived, loved and lost.
FrogDiva Thoughts 