If I could roll back my life, my universe, I would want to burn away the dust, the flack, the crap moldering my vision so that I could clearly see the road ahead. I want to see my light waves breaking free of my own gravity, where my own limitations fall behind, where I finally step beyond failures to realize dreams.

And What If My Sun Broke Free Of Its Gravity?

The sun is gravity embodied, or the closest object to a black hole I’m ever going to encounter. I mean, that ball of fire out there bends space and time around it, sucks it in like air into a lung the size of a thousand earths. I only want to get so close, close enough to ride its breath on exhale, light racing at light speed, the place where time stops and I become free to see myself smile.

I search for books two different ways. One is to go to an online bookstore and enter a title that I know about and then peruse the book, if some sort of “look inside” feature is active. Usually, I don’t go to an online bookstore unless I’m already interested in a particular book. I enter the title, and the book pops up in the list. This makes search a targeted experience and efficient, since thousands of books can come up for any general search term, like “astrophysics.” A search for “astrophysics” at Amazon.com returned 21,527 results, a list which can be sorted only a limited number of ways. I can’t imagine how long it would take to click on all those links.

But when I go to a bookstore, I find myself walking around the shelves of all the sections and randomly picking up books and opening them just to see what they are about. It’s so much easier to do this in a bookstore than it is with an online service. Today I came across Tim Brown’s “Change by Design: How Design Thinking Transforms Organizations and Inspires Innovation,” a subject that interests me, but which I probably would have never found at Amazon.

Random perusal provides a way of discovering resources and ideas that I would not have come across before since the search process didn’t begin with an intentional search for a subject or a title. The randomness pulls me in, even if the book might be in a section I wouldn’t browse while searching for books online.