For everything there is a season...

For everything there is a season, and a time for every matter under heaven.(Ecclesiastes 3:1, NRSV)

I strongly feel this verse is true especially when I read a book. My mind seems to know the right time when a particular book should be read.

I feel it now with a book about Chinese history and the Chinese translation of Milan Kundera's Unbearable Lightness of Being.

Although both have very simple structures, I once found these books awfully tough to read on. So they stayed on a bookshelf at near mint condition for more than a year until recently. Their time had not come yet…

However, I now find both extremely easy to read and quite hard to put down. And I wrote a story about the totalitarian Qin Dynasty and the Taoism of the early Han Dynasty to help a depressed friend of mine. So I think I picked up this history book again at a right time.

Although I still do not know how Kundera's book will help me, I am sure I am reading it at the right time. The novel will help me solve my own or my friend's problems somehow, sometime later.

I am very curious how it is so. But I will simply go on reading these books now because I know they are relevant to me now.

Chinese would say there is yuanfen 緣份 between me and these books. Even though the word can be translated into fate or destiny, I feel it is much gentler and softer bond brought by the forces of nature. I guess it is very close to Carl G. Jung's Synchronicity.

I don't know how it works but I know it is here always connecting me to the things and people who can lead me to enlightenment...