the alchemist

i wrote this weeks ago before my computer got a virus and had to get better, so here it is.

ok. so i'm about..oh, let's see. many thousand feet up in the air. flying home from broomfield (near denver), colorado.
the synchro team i coach just competed at the midwestern and pacific synchronized skating sectional championships. that's a mouthful. seriously. the announcers kept having some difficulties. it was amusing. however, i wouldn't have been able to do it well either. i feel like such a cool kid typing my blog on notepad. i didn't want to type it on microsoft word because they kept capitalizing words. and when i didn't want it to, they had that angry red line underneath. so i choose notepad. it works quite well for this sort of typing. i have lots of thoughts, and i wanted to get them out.

we left on wednesday morning. and after our flight was changed, we ended up in the nashville airport (which is just about as small as birmingham) for 3 hours. and i had realized that i didn't bring a book to read on the plane, which was a REALLY big deal in my world. i read obsessively on airplanes. so i wandered into the little bookstore and saw the book "the alchemist". now, if you go back about a million blog entries, someone named susan (i think i know who she is. maybe. if you are reading this--sue?) commented on an entry and told me about this book. i forgot about it until recently when i re-read her comment. and then i saw this book in the store, so i picked it up, and decided i should read it.

it's about a boy who is on the quest to find his destiny. i found it fitting, especially with what i've been going through lately. i've needed to read something that will give me some assistance. so i'm reading it, and it's good. however, about a half an hour ago, it got AWESOME. like, wow. what i need to hear. i'll recap for you, and maybe you'll want to read it too. actually, it's more of a recap so i can fully understand what the author, paulo coelho, is talking about.

so this kid is on a journey. and he meets this man called "the alchemist". i don't know what the word alchemist means. or even the word alchemy. and i can't even look it up because i'm on an airplane. it doesn't even have an entry in word's thesaurus. fail.

so the alchemist is helping santiago find his destiny. and he tells him to "listen to his heart". so i began thinking. and honestly? i'm not even sure what listening to your heart means. i tried, and i think i failed. i will work on it though. so, santiago listens to his heart which proceeds to say the following: "people are afraid to pursue their most important dreams, because they feel that they don't deserve them, or that they'll be unable to achieve them. we, their hearts, become fearful just thinking of loved ones who go away forever, or of moments that could have been good but weren't, or of treasures that might have been found but were forever hidden in the sands. because, when these things happen, we [their hearts] suffer terribly."

the alchemist proceeds to say "tell your heart that the fear of suffering is worse than the suffering itself. and that no heart has ever suffered when it goes in search of its dreams, because every second of the search is a second's encounter with God and with eternity".
i really need to remember that. because i feel like i've seriously been suffering lately, and that me and God aren't really getting along lately. but i guess i'm wrong. and i suppose i merely need to remember that God is present in the darkness. ..i need to remember that the current searching is time with god, trying to figure out what to do with my life...

however, the book continues...

"when i have been truly searching for my treasure, every day has been luminous, because i've known that every hour was a part of the dream that i would find it. when i have been truly searching for my treasure, i've discovered things along the way that i never would have seen had i not had the courage to try things that seemed impossible for a shepherd to achieve" so his heart was quite for an entire afternoon. that night, the boy slept deeply, and, when he awoke, his heart began to tell him things that came from the soul of the world. it said that all people who are happy have God within them. and that happiness could be found in a grain of sand from the desert, as the alchemist had said. because a grain of sand is a moment of creation, and the universe has taken millions of years to create it. "everyone on earth has a treasure that awaits him," his heart said. "we, people's hearts, seldom say much about those treasures, because people no loner want to go in search of them. we speak of them only to children. later, we simply let life proceed, in its own direction, toward its own fate. but, unfortunately, very few follow the path laid out for them--the path to their personal legends, and to happiness. most people see the world as a threatening place, and, because they do, the world turns out, indeed to be a threatening place. so, we, their hearts, speak more and more softly. we never stop speaking out, but we begin to hope that our words won't be heard: we don't want people to suffer because they don't follow their hearts."

ok. you should go read the book now.