Change will do ya good....

“Among other things, you'll find that you're not the first person who was ever confused and frightened and even sickened by human behavior. You're by no means alone on that score, you'll be excited and stimulated to know. Many, many men have been just as troubled morally and spiritually as you are right now. Happily, some of them kept records of their troubles. You'll learn from them—if you want to. Just as someday, if you have something to offer, someone will learn something from you. It's a beautiful reciprocal arrangement. And it isn't education. It's history. It's poetry.” 
― J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye

Last week, in a cleaning frenzy, I found my copy of J.D. Salinger's, "The Catcher in the Rye".  I hadn't thought about that story in years, or how reading it seemed to change my life or at least,  changed my thinking.  So with book in hand, I begin to flip through the pages, reading a timeless story as a fifty year old woman rather than a naive yet pretendious and troubled teenaged girl.   


At this stage in the journey, the quote above struck a different chord, one of familiarity and certainty rather than a prediction.  Maybe it was this very quote that moved me as a teen and heightened by senses to those struggling around me, I am not sure.

Maybe it was the very struggle to belong, the desire to love and be loved. On this day, at age fifty, those words feel as though they were extracted from my own heart, mind and life!