The really odd but wonderful thing about reading an actual book is that you automatically move slower through it. You have to turn pages. Sometimes you have to go back a few pages to check a name or to underline something that you don't want melting into the other words making it so hard to find again.

Some books are even slower. Meander is a good word for them. Like being a leaf on a stream. Or sitting and watching a river flow - it's mesmerizing and yet so simple. Jayber Crow by Wendell Berry, is such a book. It is the story of a very ordinary man who lives in a poor, ordinary Southern town by the edge of a river. A town that a mover or shaker would never even consider for two seconds as important for the pursuit of happiness in any form.

This book has made me question that word - pursuit. It's a word that is in our very Declaration of Independence. The pursuit of happiness - it is our right. Like many phrases, we feel like we know what it means....this pursuing. But it is a phrase that engenders a kind of frenetic pacing. Pursuit implies that the goal has not yet been attained. So, we are a nation in - pursuit of something elusive, perhaps. We thrive on slogans that excite change, cry newer and better, bigger, prettier, more powerful still. We just keep pursuing these changing things because, by gummit, it is our RIGHT.

Great piece to share, I do think that after a certain age I do feel content with what I have and that pursuit goes away, not in the sense of not progressing forward but moreso in seeking of something much more viscerally fulfilling, people describe that to mean many diff things. The best movie that describes what I am talking about is what Bill Murray becomes at the end of groundhog day, wrote somthing similar to this last month on thriller, came to the same conclusion.