I have no set time or place for choosing to do a dip; it happens in those in-between spaces, between ideas, projects, phases of the day, when I feel most malleable and unfocused. I imagine myself as Sissy Hankshaw from Even Cowgirls Get the Blues, on a dusty road with my thumb out, and the first book to pull over and open their door is the one I get into.

When I do a Literature Dip, I anticipate the joy of spontaneous connections. My curiosity is the broadest horizon, my mind an open expanse. It’s a way of letting go of how you see things so you can receive what is being said.

A Literature Dip gives me somewhere to look, outside of myself, and it clears the way for what waits to emerge from within. I become wonder, immersed in the shared experiences we all have that can somehow be encapsulated in a paragraph or a page, like the universe in a jar.

I share with you my process, a contemporary twist on bibliomancy, without the mysticism. For me, the grounded realm of human connection is the inspiration for this game. I’ve made it part of my personal curriculum, a weekly ritual of welcoming the witness perspective into the transitions of my day.

How to Choose the Books

Choosing a well-loved book, highlighted and earmarked, with marginalia decorating its pages, makes choosing passages for a “Lit Dip” easier and more spontaneous. The work is already done for you – passages that resonate are waiting to be found again and seen in a new context.

Depending on what you seek, you may be turning to books for a specific insight, a general pick-me-up, or a surprise revelation you could never have anticipated. Try out different methods to see how they feel – choose one book at a time, or conduct a syntopical Literature Dip using several books from the same author, a similar genre, or time period, as seen in the images below.

To add another challenge and a deeper narrative, choose three seemingly disparate sources from a variety of genres and find a conversation among them.

Next, I open the book to any page. If the passage speaks to me, I settle on it; if not, I open to a new page. I want the passage to feel meaningful, and sometimes it takes a few dips to get the right one. This isn’t a paranormal experience in which I’m being compelled to a certain passage; this is a meaning-making activity in which the book is the source of wisdom, and I am responsible for shaping the narrative.

Literature Dip: The Interpretation

I opened all three of these books immediately to these passages, and they weave together beautifully.

Newport’s passage rings true, in a way, but what directs our focus? Is it free will or is it our unconscious systems? What we focus on surely shapes our consciousness, but why we focus on certain things may not be up to us. This piece tells us we are responsible for what we choose and how we feel as an extension.

Le Guin states it simply – no amount of focus will change what cannot be given. It may be better, for everyone, if we radically accept what is.

And here it is! My thoughts on free will, while reading Newport, become realized by Nietzsche. He points out the myriad influences on what drives our attention and emotions. We often experience life as a series of spontaneous events, but in reality, everything is interdependent. What we think is choice in the moment was brewing long before we knew of the options.

The synthesis: Our lives are shaped through our attention, but we’re mostly unconscious beings, formed by our biology, influenced by social situations, by who and what we encounter. We might focus on things that don’t serve us, we misunderstand our relationship to what we’re experiencing, but doesn’t that realization and the experience of failure feed us too? Our understandings of why we do anything we do, including what we focus on and where we get stuck, may never be fully known to us. We seem to have choice, but it has limits, and our true motivations remain mostly a mystery.

When I chose these three books, I had no idea what would come from this reading. And, as always, I am left in awe. There are many times in life when we think things have come together just as they should, but I don’t believe in “shoulds.” When a Literature Dip weaves a coherent story and seemingly answers the question I posed, I know that’s metacognition, pattern detection, and the shared experience of our humanity at work.

I’ve created a variety of iterations of this practice that might surprise you. Paid subscribers to my Substack newsletter get early access with an inquiry guide for the Self-Discovery Lens.