What’s a book you never finished but still think about?
Some books we finish reading and then place back on our bookshelves.
As time passes, we may even forget what was written inside them.
But there are some books we never manage to finish, yet a few of their pages become a part of our lives.
For me, one such book is “The Power of the Subconscious Mind.”
It is the Hindi version of a book originally written in English. I started reading it some time ago. I intended to finish it, but because of certain circumstances, I could not.
Still, some of the things I read in those pages stayed with me in a way I never expected.
One idea, in particular, deeply affected me: when we repeatedly tell something to our subconscious mind, our mind can gradually begin to believe it.
At that time, I had no idea how important this thought would become in one of the most difficult periods of my life.
When my mother became ill and we had to face the difficult reality of cancer, I remembered that idea from the book.
I started saying encouraging things to my mother, and I tried to remind myself of the same things again and again. I wanted both of us to believe that we could not allow fear to break us. We had to keep giving our minds messages of hope and courage.
I would never claim that those words cured my mother’s illness. Her illness was a reality, and her treatment was, and continues to be, through doctors and medical care.
But those thoughts certainly helped us find some mental strength to face that difficult time.
Because when illness enters a family, it is not only the body that becomes tired.
The mind becomes tired too.
Sometimes fear feels bigger than everything else.
Sometimes thinking about the future becomes frightening.
And during such moments, holding on to one thought and repeating it to yourself can become a small source of strength that helps you keep going.
That became one of the most important lessons I took from that book.
I had not even finished reading it, yet some of its pages stood beside me during one of the most difficult periods of my life.
That made me realize that perhaps the value of a book cannot always be measured by how many pages we have read.
Sometimes a single idea can settle so deeply inside us that it stays with us longer than the entire book.
But that does not mean I do not want to finish the book.
I do.
Whenever I find the time, I want to pick it up again and read it all the way to the last page.
Because if only a few parts of that book could be so meaningful to me during such an important time in my life, I feel there must still be so much more waiting for me in the pages I have not yet read.
Perhaps the book is incomplete for me, but the lesson it gave me is not.
And maybe that is what makes me think about books so deeply.
Books have always had a different place in my life.
I have never been someone who made many friends.
The one or two friends I did make eventually became busy with their own lives. Some paths simply went in different directions, while with others, our thoughts and ways of seeing life no longer matched.
But books were different.
They never asked why I returned to them after a long time.
They never complained that I had left them unfinished.
And they never told me that they did not have time for my questions.
Whenever I wanted to understand something, books were there.
Whenever I had a question in my mind, somewhere in the pages of a book, I often found a new way of looking at it.
And whenever life felt difficult, sometimes even a single thought from a book became a quiet source of support.
That is why books are not simply words printed on paper for me.
For me, books have been my true friends.
Perhaps there is one important difference between friends and books.
A friend may walk with us through one particular phase of our life, but a good book can meet us differently at different stages of our journey.
Something we read today may only make sense years later.
Something that seems ordinary today may become deeply meaningful when life places us in a difficult situation.
Perhaps that is why some books do not simply get read by us—
they slowly begin to read us.
We look for our questions among their pages.
And sometimes, we find a part of our own answer there too.
My book is still unfinished.
But I do not want to leave it that way.
I want to finish it—because even the few pages I have read have already given me so much.
And perhaps when I finally read the rest, those pages will help me understand another part of my life.
After all, finishing a book is not only about reaching its last page.
Perhaps what truly matters is how many pages of our own lives its words continue to walk through with us.
My unfinished book has taught me one thing for certain:
Some books we never manage to finish,
yet a few of their pages help us make sense of our lives.
And perhaps that is why, even today, that book is not simply sitting on my shelf.
It is somewhere in my memories.