April 2006 Books
The Desert Pilgrim; The Identity Code: What Do I Do Now?
The Desert Pilgrim
En Route to Mysticism and Miracles
You never know when something totally unexpected is going to enter your life and change you forever. Such an incident occurred for Iowa university professor Mary Swander one cold winter night as she was driving home. Struck by an oncoming car, she emerged from the ordeal nearly completely paralyzed and in chronic pain. The medical establishment had no help to offer her. So incapacitated that she often could neither get out of bed nor feed herself, she dismissed suicide as unacceptable and returned as if by reflex to the prayer of her Catholic childhood: “Hail Mary….”
Studying the Catholic mystics set her on a bumpy road to recovery, until she became incapacitated anew. Myelitis and permanent spinal nerve damage, the doctors said, offering no hope of relief or cure.
Should she accept a visiting professorship she'd been offered at the University of New Mexico? Yes, she would. She packed up and drove west, her body still in traction. Perhaps she could connect with faith healers there who would be able to help her. Not that she had any faith left—but then, they say there are no atheists in a foxhole.
The Desert Pilgrim is Swander's story of her return to physical and emotional health and belief in the power of the unseen, garnered at the feet of a delightfully unorthodox Catholic priest and a curandera in the ancient healing tradition indigenous to the area surrounding Albuquerque. The story is real; it happened to a real person and is portrayed without hype, in words so ordinary they allow the extraordinary to emerge as the natural consequence of everyday circumstances. I found it a fascinating, compassionate, warm and soothing read.
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The Identity CodeThe 8 Essential Questions for Finding Your Purpose and Place in the World
The question of personal identity—not the identity revealed by your driver's license or social security number, but who you truly are — concerns us little most of the time, but then there are those moments when it seems the paramount issue. The question arises, am I living an authentic life? Am I doing what I came here to do?
In The Identity Code , identity-based management pioneer Larry Ackerman invites us to take a good, hard look at who we really are. And he offers a powerful set of tools for doing this: a set of eight questions that lead to uncovering the eight natural Laws of Identity that “have proven to be as universally absolute, inescapable and predictive in their effect on life as the laws of physics, which govern the external world.”
Ackerman makes it clear that we must step out of the illusion of having freedom of choice to be whatever we want if we are to discover the being that we truly are and use that discovery to create a truly fulfilling life. “You can't be anything you want to be,” he says, “but you have more potential than you know.”
The book is a thought-provoking presentation of the eight laws as relevant to the individual life, followed in each case by a series of exercises to create greater clarity and enhance our ability to self-actualize. I've only done a few of the exercises—it does require commitment—but I plan to continue, for I can see that the process is invaluable.
What Do I Do Now?
A Handbook for Life
This is a book about how to be happy. Not for a short time, and not because things are going our way, but about how to live a life based in fulfillment and joy. Klein sums it all up in the first paragraph of the first chapter: “Personal happiness is the product of whom you love, who loves you and what you accomplish during your time on this earth. That's it. You can stop now if you wish, but the chapters that follow will discuss how to maximize your relationships and accomplishments and create personal happiness for yourself, so you may want to read on.”
And he goes on to relate a wealth of stories from his own life and the over 100,000 conversations he's had with patients in twenty years of medical practice—stories about values, integrity, forming good habits, doing the things that make relationships work and guarantee success on the road of life. You're sure to recognize yourself in many of them, to laugh and wince and, one hopes, find value you can apply to your own life.
What Do I Do Now? is being used as the basis for a course at Harvard University . It's the kind of information most of us get some exposure to in the school of hard knocks, but I can't help wishing my generation had been spoon-fed such wisdom when we were in college. It might have saved us a few knocks.
—Chiwah
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