The missing brick

By Paulo Coelho

Once, when I and my wife were traveling, I received a fax from my secretary.

‘There’s one glass brick missing for the work on the kitchen renovation,’ she said. ‘I’m sending you the original plan as well as the plan the builder has come up with to compensate for it.’

On the one hand was the design my wife had made: harmonious lines of bricks with an opening for ventilation. On the other hand was the plan drawn up to resolve the problem of the missing brick: a real jigsaw puzzle in which the glass squares were arranged in a higgledy-piggledy fashion that defied aesthetics.

‘Just buy another brick,’ wrote my wife. And so they did and thus stuck to the original design.

That afternoon, I thought for a long time about what had happened; how often, for the lack of one brick, we completely distort the original plan of our lives.

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3 Responses to “The missing brick”


  1. 1 marie

    Its crazy but sometimes all it takes is one extra brick to make that change in your life.

    too cute LOL
    Marie

  2. 2 Wendy

    My thought is, we tend to go a little bit crazy when we had a situation that’s going different way we planned to or spected to. I think why trouble, problems always have solutions, and we know it; why stress if it doesn’t have a solution, because we know this too. We should never have only a plan “A”, for somethings. We should have always, plan, “A to Z”, so we don’t distort; nothing is garanteed in life.

  3. 3 Ilana

    As a designer I am faced with this sort of problem constantly. Clients want to save on one brick and expect us to work magic when even the most important structural elements are missing. Bricks can take the form of time, money, good taste, common sense, respect, values, etc… When one of these elements are missing, a good designer is challenged and will often surpass him or herself by finding new solutions, and this is where “magic” happens. When all those elements are are missing, I maintain that magic simply cannot take place. I’m seriously considering giving up on design and becoming a writer instead. But surely there is still a place in this world for intelligent design?

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