What I'm Reading

Woman with No Regrets tagged me yesterday for a meme that I've seen all over the place, but don't think I've ever done.

Here's what I have to do:

1. Pick up the nearest book.
2. Open to page 123
3. Find the 5th sentence
4. Post the next three sentences
5. Tag five people, and acknowledge who tagged you.

Since I'm currently reading several books in tandem, the closest book could have been one of many: The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals; Six-Figure Freelancing; and A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose. And that's not to mention the chance that the closest book might be one I haven't started to read yet, of which there are too many to count right now. Anyway, it turns out that I had just been reading A New Earth the night before and it was still on my coffee table next to my laptop when I read No Regret's challenge, so that's what you're getting.

A bit of A New Earth by Eckhart Tolle:

The ego doesn't know that the more you include others, the more smoothly things flow and the more easily things come to you. When you give little or no help to others or put obstacles in their path, the universe — in the form of people and circumstances — gives little or no help to you because you have cut yourself off from the whole. The ego's unconscious core feeling of "not enough" causes it to react to someone else's success as if that success had taken something away from "me."

I actually haven't gotten to this part in the book, so when I read this page in it's entirety last night, it just so happened that my writing critique group had been having a similar conversation a couple of hours earlier about our tendency toward jealousy of other writers' successes. How's that for synchronicity? Apparently the universe is trying to tell me something here.

I know most of the people I read regularly have done this, so if you want to do it again, consider yourself tagged. If not, that's fine, too.

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In other news, if you haven't already visited there this week, there's a new post up at Write Out Loud. It's about the freedom that we can find by limiting ourselves and I included a writing exercise inspired by another blogger. I'll be doing both my own exercise and the one that inspired it this weekend (if all goes well), and I'll post the results. So stop by Write Out Loud, check it out, give it a try, and post your results in the comments or on your own blog (don't forget to leave a link to it, though). I can't wait to see what you all come up with!

Oh, and please ignore all the mixed up colors. I'm still playing around with the color scheme and design, trying to make it match my website a bit better.