What is this thing I hold in my hand?

Hey guys,

So I am now onto the 9th Day of the IMBC challenge. The challenge is to look at something with a fresh pair of eyes like a baby does. As a baby everything around is new to them. They slowly learn things by keenly observing how each and everything is done. It’s a pleasure to watch a baby learn new things. They learn that they need to cry to get something. They learn that they need to put forward their hands to reach out for something. Many such slow incremental things accumulate in order.

Now the task is if you were to see something with a fresh new perspective, what would be it? Give a baby step to something and explore this new perception and dimension with your engaging thoughts. You can give a fresh meaning to a new word, sentence, concept or anything weird or meaningful. Check out the IMBC home page if you wish to join this challenge.

The challenge:

What is this thing I hold in my hand? It is a flat rectangular object that has layers of paper between two thicker sheets. I feel like I am holding someone’s life force in my hand but yet it is not a heart. I smell the sweet fresh scent of the paper, old and musty. I flip this object open and the pages open up, the words written across them like lines of poetry. I grab the next similar object on the shelf, this one is a bit heavier maybe it contains more information. I put the bigger object on the table where I came from and sit myself down on the wooden chair. I start to turn the pages and try to piece together what this object is telling me. What is this thing I hold in my hand, is it the gateway to another universe, or is it the answer to the question that has been bugging me.

I suddenly click this is not one single object, this is an image of a person; the writer. They have put their story, their heart and soul into these words on this page that I now read. I am reading and glimpsing the life of another person that I have never met before that could be anywhere in the world. This object is not one single object it is multiple. It has crossed oceans, timelines, countries and space to the table where I sit with it in my hand. I am looking at generations of people picking up the same object, picking up a piece of history, a story or maybe an idea.

So what is this object I hold in my hand? It is a book. It is a beautiful piece of art and it is someone else’s story.

The truth about books – Carl Sagan

What an astonishing thing a book is. It is a flat object made from a tree with flexible parts on which are imprinted lots of funny dark squiggles. But one glance and you’re inside the mind of another person, maybe somebody dead for thousands of years. Across the millenia an author is speaking clearly and silently inside your head directly to you. Writing is perhaps the greatest of human inventions binding together people who never knew each other, citizens of distant epochs. Books break the shackles of time. A book is proof that humans are capable of working magic.