I remember receiving a letter from the American
publisher, HarperCollins, which 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 translated!" 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 were sold in America. One day, a
Brazilian journalist phoned to say that President Clinton had been photographed
reading the book. Some time later, when I was in Turkey, I opened the
magazine Vanity Fair and there was Julia Roberts, declaring
that she adored the book. Walking alone down a street in Miami, I heard a girl
telling her mother, "You must read The Alchemist!"
The book has been translated into 61 languages, has sold
more than 30 million copies worldwide, and people are beginning to ask:
"What's the secret behind such a huge success?" The only honest
response is that 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 dreams.Why?
There are four obstacles. First, we are told from
childhood onwards that everything we want to do is impossible. We grow up with
this idea, and as the years accumulate, so too do the later 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 our 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 forwards, and 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 favor, 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.
So, why is it so important to live our personal calling
if we are only going to suffer more than other people? Because once we have
overcome the defeats - and we always do- we are filled with a greater sense of
euphoria and confidence. In the silence of our hearts, we know that we are
proving ourselves worthy of the miracle of life. Each day, each hour, is part
of the good fight. We start to live with enthusiasm and pleasure. Intense,
unexpected suffering passes more quickly than suffering that is apparently
bearable; the latter goes on for years and, without our noticing, eats away at
our soul, until, one day, we are no longer able to free ourselves from the
bitterness and it stays with us for the rest of our lives.
Having disinterred our dream, having used the power of
love to nurture it and spent many years living with the scars, we suddenly
notice that what we always wanted is there, waiting for us, perhaps the very
next day. Then comes the fourth obstacle: the fear of realizing the dream for
which we have been fighting all our lives.
Oscar
Wilde said, "Each man kills the thing he loves." And it's true. The
mere possibility of getting what we want fills the soul of the ordinary person
with guilt. We look around at all those who have failed to get what they want
and feel that we do not deserve to get what we want either. We forget about all
the obstacles we overcame, all the suffering we endured, all the things we had
to give up in order to get this far. I have known a lot of people who, when
their personal calling was within their grasp, went on to commit a series of
stupid mistakes and never reached their goal when it was only a step away.
This is the most dangerous of the obstacles because it
has a kind of saintly aura about it: renouncing joy and conquest. But if you
believe yourself worthy of the thing you fought so hard to get, then you become
an instrument of God, you help the Soul of the World, and you understand why
you are here.
Translated by Margaret Jull Costa
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