Turning 40 seemed to be a traumatic event. I faced it by inviting to dinner the ten women who had most influenced my life. My mother, my daughter, and my therapist joined me at a Benihana, and I never needed to visit another such restaurant. Now my mother is dead, the therapist and I lost touch, and my daughter doesn't speak to me. So much for noticing the important people in life, and turning 40 was nada compared to subsequent life events.
Why am I telling you this? Because it is relevant to an interesting book I just read, The Noticer: Sometimes, all a person needs is a little perspective by Andy Andrews. It's a short book, an easy read, not literary but not crap, either, by any stretch. It's pretty innocuous, really. One little story made me stop to think about myself, my life, and my relationships with others. That is a pretty historic event right there. No other self-help material has given me so much pause to reflect since I read Stephen Covey's 7 Habits of Highly Effective People in the early 1990s.
I can't tell you what the book is about, because it is simply a narration of several loosely connected stories concerning an old man who delivers little lessons on life principles to people who seem to need to learn them . I don't think he offers anything for which you can't cite a 12-Step aphorism. (12-Steppers have a handy saying for every situation.) Some of the notions I have already discovered for myself, but then I'm 65 years old. So maybe this book might help younger people avoid some of the pain I've caused myself. Would they listen? Would they understand? Did I? Obviously not. And a couple principles require a faith that I simply don't have, so I disagree with them.
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