“Only a life lived for others is worth living.” - Albert Einstein

One 'The Alchemist' Lesson

While resting for a while before I go back to my studying, I skimmed my bookshelves to look for a book that I could read lightly and not completely. I then saw my second (I left the first copy we had back home) The Alchemist book, which is in the same shelf as my Austen and other Coelho collections, and other novels like Jewel and If Only It Were True and below some super fantasy books like that new dystopian fiction series called The Twilight Saga (Yes, unfortunately). As I have decided to, I took it from the shelf, thinking that it would be the perfect one to read to kill a little time. As I was starting to read it for the fourth time, I noticed that I had put a bookmark on a page where one of my favorite lessons in the book was. I then opened it and found a surprisingly relevant lesson that I can use for the following days.

It simply says what the book is all about (following your heart in finding your dreams or heart's desire-typically happiness) but it is very relevant to what I have been thinking and asking lately (probably for years now).

Anyways, I do not want to go further with this so I will be ending this with an entry (in a dialogue format) of that lesson.
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The following are excerpts from the book, found on pages 128-130:

Santiago: "Why do we have to listen to our hearts?"

Alchemist: "Because, wherever your heart is, that is where you'll find your treasure."

Santiago: "But my heart is agitated. It has its dreams, it gets emotional, and it's become passionate over a woman of the desert. It asks things of me, and it keeps me from sleeping many nights, when I'm thinking about her."

Alchemist: "Well that's good. Your heart is alive. Keep listening to what it has to say."

Santiago: "My heart is a traitor. It does not want me to go on."

Alchemist: "That makes sense. Naturally it's afraid that, in pursuing your dream, you might lose everything you've won."

Santiago: "Well, then, why should I listen to my heart?"

Alchemist: "Because you will never again be able to keep it quiet. Even if you pretend not to have heard what it tells you, it will always be there inside you, repeating to you what you're thinking about life and about the world."

Santiago: "You mean I should listen, even if it's treasonous?"

Alchemist: "Treason is a blow that comes unexpectedly. If you know your heart well, it will never be able to do that to you. Because you'll know its dreams and wishes, and will know how to deal with them.
You will never be able to escape from your heart. So it's better to listen to what it has to say. That way, you'll never have to fear an unanticipated blow."

Heart: "Even though I complain sometimes, it's because I'm the heart of a person, and people's hearts are that way. 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 treasures that might have been found but were forever hidden in the sands. Because, when these things happen, we suffer terribly."

Santiago: "My heart is afraid that it will have to suffer."

Alchemist: "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."

Santiago: "Every second of the search is an encounter with God. 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."

The Alchemist