4 Phenomenal Books I’ll Likely Keep Rereading All My Life
4 Phenomenal Books I’ll Likely Keep Rereading All My Life
Here’s why you probably should as well
40 years down the line, as I’m rocking in my chair with a wizened face and creaky joints, what book would I reach out to?
To reread the dog-eared, yellowed, and withering paperback for maybe the 70th time?
It was a challenging question that took quite some pondering to arrive at an answer.
Wise books are rare. Timeless books are rarer. But books that are both wise and timeless?
Finger-countably few. I want to share 4 such books with you.
The Bhagavad Gita
You don’t find the Gita — the Gita finds you.
This Hindu scripture compresses millennia of the highest wisdom into an easy-to-read group of verses.
The Bhagavad Gita’s wisdom is such that you already need quite some existing wisdom to unlock it. Here are 3 of its most powerful quotes:
“We are kept from our goal, not by obstacles, but by a clear path to a lesser goal.”
“It is better to live your own destiny imperfectly than to imitate someone else’s with perfection.”
“Hell has three gates: lust, anger and greed.”
Had I stumbled upon it earlier in my life, I wouldn’t have grasped even the tiny fraction of its essence that I presently have.
Every new generation arrogantly thinks it’s smarter than the preceding one. What would backward “old geezers” and ancient “illiterates” know, right?
Wrong. While science has been “advancing”, the human condition has been the same for millennia.
Happiness, joy, sorrow, meaning, fulfillment, ethics, suffering — be it the hunter-gatherer or the pin-striped CEO, every human wrestles with these questions.
The Gita has the answers. All the answers.
But are you (and am I) humble enough to bow down to its wisdom — and patient enough to ponder the profound ideas?