A Signpost Found in an Autumn Bookstore
Autumn has arrived, bringing cool, refreshing breezes. Even without resorting to the familiar cliché that autumn is “the season for reading,” no one can deny that it is the ideal time to quiet the heart beneath high, clear skies and keep a good book close at hand.
Visit a busy bookstore on a weekend, and you will find shelf after shelf packed with books. And why are there so many categories? From parenting guides for welcoming a newborn child to charming picture books, from exam-prep books and essays filled with the fierce passion and awkward worries of school days to gentle books of rest for those preparing for the close of life, the bookstore lays out the entire span of a human life like a single, orderly signpost. Looking over all those volumes, I come to feel that a person’s life resembles a journey of building “one unique library,” filled with one’s own story.
A Library Built over a Lifetime
From the moment we are born, we begin building a library of our own. Its foundation is laid with the first picture books we read in the warm embrace of our parents. Then the fresh memories of adolescence, our tearful efforts, and at times painful failures and frustrations pile up, one by one, on its shelves. As we set out onto the rough seas of society, the process of bearing the weight of life and finding stability is likewise preserved as a weighty record.
The library newly built in our hearts undergoes expansion whenever we reach an important turning point. When we meet another person through the Blessing and form a family, shelves from a new world we had never known are connected to it. And when our beloved children are born and grow, the library begins yet another deep and wide addition. The stories we write as parents fill the library with ever greater richness and variety.
As the years pass and we reach the hill of twilight, the library’s shelves grow quieter and more orderly. Hot-bloodedness and impatience fade, and the wisdom to see life deeply, together with a calm sense of grace, seeps warmly into every corner of the shelves.
A Library That Vanishes, Wisdom That Endures
There is an old African proverb: “When an old man dies, a library burns to the ground.” It expresses how weighty and precious are the experience and wisdom a person accumulates over a lifetime, along with the heartfelt devotion they offer to Heaven.
Indeed, when someone’s life comes to an end, the earthly library they so carefully built seems to disappear as well. Yet within the history of the providence, this library never vanishes. The shelves of devotion and wisdom built up by earlier generations are passed down, becoming a firm foothold from which the next generation can leap to greater heights.
The lives of blessed families who, over many years, have walked the path of pioneering while holding the teachings of Heavenly Parent and True Parents in their hearts were, in themselves, a vast “library of the providence.” The record of sweat and tears they built up will never disappear; it is now becoming the firm cornerstone of a library that the young generation will inherit and build anew.
What Books Will Fill My Library?
Even now, each day, we are writing new pages in the library of our lives. What books will fill the library of my life, which will soon be complete? That depends entirely on my own choices. Will I fill it with the stubbornness that clings only to my own experience and with words of pride that look down on others? Or will I fill it with records of warm listening that fully embraces others and of unchanging faith in Heaven?
On these cool autumn days, let us quietly look into the shelves of our souls. Standing on the noble legacy of faith left to us by earlier generations, I hope that today, too, we can calmly fill the libraries within our hearts with stories of listening and wholehearted love.
