I
REMEMBER RECEIVING A LETTER FROM THE AMERICAN publisher Harper Collins that
said that: “reading The Alchemist was like getting up at dawn and seeing
the sun rise while the rest of the world still slept.” I went outside, looked
up at the sky, and thought to myself: “So, the book is going to be published in
English!” At the time, I was struggling to establish myself as a writer and to
follow my path despite all the voices telling me it was impossible.
And
little by little, my dream was becoming reality. Ten, a hundred, a thousand, a
million copies sold in America. One day, a Brazilian journalist phoned to say
that President Clinton had been photographed reading the book. Sometime later, when
I was in Turkey, I opened the magazine Vanity Fair and there was Julia
Roberts declaring that she adored the Alchemist. Walking alone down a street in
Miami, I heard a girl telling her mother: “You must read The Alchemist!”
The
Alchemist has been translated into fifty-six languages, has sold more than
twenty million copies, and people are beginning to ask: What’s the secret
behind such a huge success?
The only honest response is: I
don’t know. All I know is that, like Santiago the shepherd boy, we all need to be
aware of our personal calling. What is a personal calling? It is God’s
blessing, it is the path that God chose for you here on Earth. Whenever we do
something that fills us with enthusiasm, we are following our legend. However,
we don’t all have the courage to confront our own dream.
Why?
There
are four obstacles. First: we are told from childhood onward that everything we
want to do is impossible. We grow up with this idea, and as the years
accumulate, so too do the layers of prejudice, fear, and guilt. There comes a
time when our personal calling is so deeply buried in our soul as to be
invisible. But it’s still there.
If
we have the courage to disinter dream, we are then faced by the second
obstacle: love. We know what we want to do but are afraid of hurting those
around us by abandoning everything in order to pursue our dream. We do not
realize that love is just a further impetus, not something that will prevent us
going forward. We do not realize that those who genuinely wish us well want us
to be happy and are prepared to accompany us on that journey.
Once
we have accepted that love is a stimulus, we come up against the third
obstacle: fear of the defeats we will meet on the path. We who fight for our
dream, suffer far more when it doesn’t work out, because we cannot fall back on
the old excuse: “Oh, well, I didn’t really want it anyway.” We do want it and
know that we have staked everything on it and that the path of the personal
calling is no easier than any other path, except that our whole heart is in
this journey. Then, we warriors of light must be prepared to have patience in
difficult times and to know that the Universe is conspiring in our favour, even
though we may not understand how.
I
ask myself: are defeats necessary?
Well, necessary or not, they
happen. When we first begin fighting for our dream, we have no experience and
make many mistakes. The secret of life, though, is to fall seven times and to
get up eight times.
Click on the link below to download The Alchemist by PAULO COELHO in pdf format:
Click on the link below to download The Alchemist by PAULO COELHO in pdf format:
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