Today’s question by the reader : Barbara

This is something I don’t like, looking back and wondering about the ‘other’ path. In my opinion, there is no other path. It makes no sense really. In reality, if we do not have the power to change a previous action from the moment it was made, then the alternative doesn’t exist anymore does it?

The alternative, the ‘If’ only exists before the action is taken. To me, there is only one version of Santiago’s story. It would make no sense to see him stay in the mountains. He would eventually come upon the road he is on now, but through back alleys and only a shadow of the knowledge he gains from his first path.

I think we all love the Alchemist for the path Santiago has taken anyway. His communication with nature, crystal, desert winds, all of it. I wouldn’t want to see Santiago walk a more mundane path. Santiago awoke to the world. He began to feel it as part of him, not as something outside of him.

Reply

Can;t nothing make your life work if u aint the architect- Terry Mcmillan – says it all -Blessings Tania

Reply

“Dying while being alive….” A similar thought crossed through my mind just yesterday – I truly believe that this is what I have been engaged in for the past two and a half years: dying while still alive. It isn’t that I never left my parents. I left the day after I graduated from high school. That very morning, I packing my belongings in the trunk of my car, stuffed the back seat full too. My dad said, “Wait till tomorrow and I’ll help you.” “No, thanks, I’m fine,” I said, and that was all. I drove away, not to look back for the next twenty years. I kept in touch with my parent, of course, and visited occasionally. But I also moved around incessantly. At one point, I calculated and realized that for the previous ten year period I had averaged moving more than once a year, not staying in any one city or state for longer than nine months. I worked. Luckily, I found a profession that accommodated my wanderlust. Then, at the end of that period, my mom died. At that point, I truly felt like a boat loosed from its moorings: I moved to Mexico for a year, then to England, the a third year in Italy. Then I said, Okay, the one thing – the only thing – that has remained a constant throughout is my desire to write. I still want to write. So I applied to a writing program in the US and returned to go to the university. By the time that was complete, I looked up to realize that my grandmother, my only remaining grandparent, was very ill, and my dad was getting quite old. So, I decided that I could endure living in Texas for a time, in this small town, in this rural area. After all, I wanted my young daughter to get to know my dad and grandmother. Moving here would also give me time to write. All of this seemed very logical. What I did not foresee was the toll it would take on my very spirit. When I was very young, I did not know why I had to get out of here; I only knew that I had to escape, and as quickly as possible, or I would surely die. The death I feared was not a physical one, but a spiritual death. This place and this people, I find, even now, like a bag over my head that threatens at every instant to suffocate me. I can survive here – “survive” – but I cannot live. It is hard to explain this – how one can be so wholly unsuited, by their very nature, to the people they were born among and the place where they grew up. For me, it is not “home” to which I have returned, but a sort of spiritual dungeon. This is why just yesterday I was thinking a similar thought and why today Paulo’s words seem so appropriate: As long as I remain here, I am indeed in the process of “dying while being alive.”

Santiago should not go back! Certainly he should not follow somebody else’s idea of what his life should look like. I’m a parent too, and as parents, we often think we know what is best for our children. Unfortunately, we are seldom right. In fact, Santiago should never even pause to glance back over his shoulder, for if he does, as Paulo Coelho often warns, he may well turn to a pillar of salt!

That’s where I am now in my life: I am that pillar of salt. I look at it this way, however: If I am still conscious enough to recognize my condition, there is yet hope. There is a way out of here. If I escaped once, with no skills, very little education, and no clue of what I was doing or where I was going, surely I can manage to escape again.

My grandmother, now ninety, is still ill; my dad, still getting older every day. But I cannot live my life for them. I couldn’t fashion my life to please them when I was twenty, and I cannot do it now, for to do so, at least in my case, is deadly. Some would call this selfish. But again, as Paulo says, it is all too easy to blame others for our own failure to follow and accomplish our dreams. I could stay here, harnessed by the notion that, as a single woman, I am obligated to live near and care for my grandmother and my dad. And my grandmother could live to be a hundred! My dad, as well. Then what? By then I’ll be almost seventy, and I’ll still be in the kitchen, making coffee, cooking bacon, making biscuits by hand and muttering under my breath about the dream that got away – complaining that I always wanted to be a writer, always wanted to move to another country, but because of my dad and my grandmother, I never got to follow my dreams.

Social norms, such as the ideas which define the roles we are “supposed” to assume in life (i.e. a single woman is “supposed” to be caregiver to aging family members, not to have a life of her own), they are like stones we willing tie around our own ankles. Then, at the end of our life, we blame someone else for all the things we dreamed of doing but never accomplished. Thus we live, dying while still alive.

Thanks so much for your words of encouragement, Paulo Coelho! Thanks for reminding us NOT TO LOOK BACK, but to follow our dreams – dreams of our own making – wherever they may lead us.

Sincerely,
Savita Vega

Reply