Book Review: The Noticer

Perspective.

When you’re facing a crisis, having someone tell you that you need “perspective” sounds trite, simplistic, and/or offensive.  You don’t need perspective, you need what’s wrong to be right.

However, once you gain perspective, you look back and realize it really was was the most important thing you needed.  Without the right perspective, you cannot take the right path.

The Noticer is a wonderful little book about perspective.  How lost our lives can become without it.  How rescued our lives can become with it.

The book itself plays out like a “Touched by an Angel” episode, where a variety of people in a town are all helped by a mysterious stranger named Jones.  In each of their situations, the help that Jones gives them is a new perspective on their life situation.  As he tells a young homeless man, “I give them a broader view… and it allows them to regroup, take a breath, and begin their lives again.”

It’s a clever and winsome way to wrap up some disparate observations & wisdom on living into a book.   Although I usually prefer heavy, deep, non-fiction tomes on this sort of subject, I enjoyed reading The Noticer.  It made me think, and it made me smile.  Jones goes up to a married couple and tells them, “Now then.  You are having marital problems.”  Shocked, they ask him how he knows.  He slyly replies, “Because you’re married.  When you’re married, those are the kind of problems you have.”

Over the course of the book Jones helps a young homeless man, a married couple on the brink of divorce, a chronic worrier, some teens with dating woes, a lonely widow, and an unethical young businessman, all with a few words of insight.  His last words of wisdom are perhaps his best:

Your time on this earth is a gift to be used wisely.

Don’t squander your words or your thoughts.

Consider that even the simplest actions you take for your lives matter beyond measure… and they matter forever.

Will The Noticer change your life? Not likely.  Is it a pleasant little read for a few hours when your don’t want your brain to be in high gear?  Yes, I found it so, & I think you will too.

If you liked this post, you might also enjoy:

• Living From Your Strengths
• The Principle of the Path
• Seven Rules to Get You Moving Again
• You are Needed
• Two Approaches to Wisdom