makes you wonder

On a recent evening, I spent at least an hour doing something I absolutely love to do: I wandered through Chapters. Only an hour, but somehow it felt like three. There are no clocks in the bookstore, and everyone moves at their own pace. Lots of slow moving, entirely absorbed individuals; I am one of them. With books you can be captured more by the world in your hands than the world in which you sit; I like this. But as I wandered, I was subconsciously counting covers, authors, pages. I was overwhelmed, as I often am at the bookstore, with the mass amounts of books there are in this world.

One of my favorite scenes in Beauty and the Beast is Belle's introduction to the library (although the Disney version doesn't quite do it justice); the Beast, in his enchantment, somehow has access to all of the books ever written - past, present, future. Name a language, name a topic, name a writer or a year of publication - he's got it. As much as I would love to spend a lifetime's worth of hours wandering around that library, there is a large part of me that fears it all the same.

Chapters alone has the ability to knock the wind out of my confidence as a writer. There are so many books. And this without paying homage to the millions of books that have been written the world over, the books that are being written right now as we speak, or the books that will be written next year...and every year until time stops.

While I don't expect to contribute anything of notable popularity to the expansive world of literature, I do expect that I will contribute...somehow. Mediocrity is something I won't settle for, but I also recognize that in a world filled with so much talent, my best might just be mediocre in comparison. I think I am okay with this reality.

Now to get past the first chapter.