You have the freedom to Dip Your Sponge!

I love books and reading....have I mentioned that?  Okay, but some books really make you think hard about the Dip Your Sponge philosophy.  One I've read recently is JoJo Moyes' 'ME BEFORE YOU'.  The basic premise is "What if your life changed drastically in an instant?  Would you be able to adapt and forge a new pathway or would you give up because you missed your old life so much?"  The book, which has a chick-lit cover that doesn't remotely do justice to the serious nature of the content, follows a young man who lives life at such a pace that he's never still - a high-flying career, a daredevil traveller and a lover of adventure sports - maybe he even overdid the Dip Your Sponge bit as he was never still, but that was his personality.  In the first chapter (so I'm not giving anything away) all this is taken away in one horrendous moment.  You come away from the book appreciating everything about your life, even the simple things like getting yourself food when you are hungry and having basic privacy and choice.

Another book that reminded me to Dip My Sponge as often as possible was a book we read with my wonderful online bookclub 'Every Book and Cranny' (http://www.my-bookclub.com/bookclub/every-book-and-cranny/), called 'DELIRIUM' by Lauren Oliver. This described a future United States with closed borders and a dictatorship where love and all it's accompaniments such as poetry and demonstrations of affection are banned, not just between lovers but friends, parents, siblings....anyone.  A cure has been found which involves an operation to remove the emotion centre of the brain.  This is performed at the age of 18. The sorrowful results are that parents no longer even love their children and a manual similar to Mao's Red Book uses classic stories and art and poetry as warning symptoms of the disease.  It is a very real and convincing portrait of an alternative world and the really scary thing is that our current day scientists have actually recently identified the part of the brain that processes emotions so its not such a stretch of the imagination to leap to some dictator having all their subjects robotised.

So let's revel in our freedom and make the most of the fact that we are allowed to celebrate art and literature and to hug and write and sing and dance just as we wish.