it is written

Now that 2 people have come up to me in the same day to tell me that they found my blog, I have decided to write something meaningful. So please ignore the previous posts k cool.

I was recently thinking about one of my favorite books, Paulo Coehlo’s “The Alchemist,” because I saw it lying on the floor in Mr. Anderson’s room. Reading it over the summer after eighth grade (probably the most significant turning point in my maturity), I remember thinking that it had effectively encompassed the most beautiful of life’s philosophies into a compact little novel, all set against the enthralling backdrop of Moorish Andalusia (Al Andalus) in the Middle Ages.

Its tagline is “A fable about following your dream.” This just sounds ridiculous to me. I mean, we hear this phrase so much and then the real world shatters our childhood dreams of combatting flames and saving kittens, floating amongst satellites and stars, or even weaving in and out of clouds in an airplane.

I think that a better description of the book (which was originally written in Spanish, I think—so maybe the follow your dreams thing was just translated badly and it wasn’t actually so cliche. I should look this up) would be “Trust your instincts.” Imagine how much more relaxed standardized testing would be if we were correct every time we put down our first guess. Without carefully reading each answer, the passage, or even the question.

And maybe that’s where the appeal of “Trust your instincts” lies, for me at least. It’s at once illogical, rash, and risky, and an exquisite falsehood that deceives you like Brer Rabbit. But Coelho’s idealism seems so fresh and separate from the disillusioned world we live in that the book instantly took me into a land where things were primal, less complicated, and so much more illuminated.

A lot of the novel deals with luck and its effect on our lives. If we believe that every aspect of our lives can be attributed to fate, and something “Maktub” by a higher power (not even necessarily God, for those of us as unreligious as I am), we have just relinquished control over our destinies.

But maybe that’s not a bad thing—we all know we make bad choices frequently, and even though we eventually learn from them, wouldn’t it be better if something tried and trusted drove the one thing most important to us? It’s much more comforting to know that no matter how many, severe, or frequent our lapses in judgment are, everything will always be okay. Even if this whole philosophy is wrong, believing things fall into place just makes me happier and better able to embrace or work around the challenges that life hits me on the head with.

I have always believed everything happens for a reason. It’s often unfair, painful, and difficult to live through at the time. Maybe even a long time. But when the sun sets, we are all able to acknowledge that it has shaped us and our future actions in ways we may never be aware of, and something good will have emerged from the darkness. And if we leave it all to luck, we can, with Santiago, follow the messages of the stars rather than speculate how they got there. We can forget about deciphering “the meaning of life,” and just start living.

14 comments March 17, 2009