And it is—sort of.
Each month we choose a book to read and then gather together to discuss it because that’s what book clubs are about. Right? It sounded so simplistic in the beginning, just a fun thing to do. It was all about the reading and well, many of us like to read, some of us would like to read more. We started out with goal. A book a month.

And so the East Dalhousie Book Club came into being. The first one of its kind. Now that’s remarkable! I like firsts.

And so we called it a book club.
And it is—sort of. But it turns out it’s much more than reading. It’s about taking the time to slow down and spend some alone time with the person you should know best in this world—You. We make ourselves be too busy-–yes, make. We hurry from one task to another. We agree to take on too many things for fear that we’ll let someone down when the person we’re really letting down is ourselves. We don’t take time to dream or to daydream or to pretend. How can we expect to create things in our lives if we don’t dream them into being first? Thoughts come first. Every thing that is created in the world first begins with a thought, an image, a desire, a want, a wish, a hope. We sometimes forget all the things that we refer to as the “little things” in life, although I’ve come to understand that most of the “little things” really amount to big things if we’re being perfectly honest. Books allow us to dream, to think, to imagine, to desire, to want, to wish, to hope. All those big “little things” we push aside because we’re too darn busy.

We call it a book club.
And it is—sort of.
It’s an exchange of ideas, the expressing of one’s self through the spoken word about the written word. It’s communication and the gathering of people who might not otherwise find a reason to gather– to speak, to express, to examine, to find out exactly what your view is on a particular subject. We don’t always know what our thoughts are about something until we open ourselves up and start talking. It’s about discovering who we are, our likes and dislikes, the things that make us happy or sad or angry. All these things we give voice to during our book club discussions. One voice is as important as another. We share.

What I have learned is that even if a particular book isn’t my cup of tea, the themes within that story are things I can relate to on some level. I believe that no matter how our lives differ, we all can relate to one another at least on an emotional level. We all experience emotions even though we all follow a different path in life. We’ve all experienced sadness, happiness, joy,fear. As a child growing up I had the sense that certain emotions were a bad, the ones that were looked at as negative. I thought it was wrong to say that something made me angry or caused me to shed tears, made me afraid. But I know now, we can learn from the negative as well as the positive because sometimes life doesn’t always give us the results we’d like. We can either give in and call it quits or we can dig deeper and keep trying until we finally get the intended results. Sometimes the lesson we learn need to come from those failed attempts.

We call it a book club.
And it is—sort of. Because life is more about the unseen than the seen. Always has been for me at least. It’s not about the amount of stuff we acquire or the job we do, but the lives we touch. It’s about taking the time to listen, to offer compassion; it’s about lending a helping a hand, and being a friend, giving without looking for recognition. And above all it’s about love. And when we explore who we really are on the inside we are much more effective in the world. We learn. We love. We live.

We call it a book club.
And it is—sort of. It’s about opening your mind to new ideas, being willing to learn about something you know nothing about. It’s about learning to bend, to accept that ours is not the only way. It’s about challenging our beliefs, our thoughts, and our morals.

We call it a book club, because everything has to be called something, and book club is much shorter than the post I’ve just written.

Do you belong to a book club? How has that experience been for you?