paulo coelho

Life is not meant to suffer, however, you do. “Life is hard”, you say. “It never was easy for me.” You feel sorry for yourself, however, you know you shouldn’t.  Then something happens. You get very sick, lose the loved one, lose all your possessions, lose the job… Besides the visible changes, the event brings in to your life, there is something else that’s happening on a background – the internal battle. The old yourself does not want to accept the new life. He holds on tight on old memories and believes. Like a broken record he runs the old memories in his mind over and over again. He is stuck in the past, where he is healthy and wealthy. In his mind, he still wakes up every morning to fist favorite cup of coffee. He retires to bed and hugs his lover. The memories of the past are too sweet to let go of them, so he re-lives them over and over.

The reality is that the world around him had changed. His life is not the same. He doesn’t even look the same. This difference between past and current is the space for suffering. The longer he stays in the past, the wider this “suffer gap” gets. At some point, sooner or later, the Universe asks him: “Why do you still hold on to your life if it causes you so much pain? What the purpose of your fight?”. 

Those who can’t answer the question – give up. Their bodies remain alive physically, but their soles die. They come in terms that there is nothing they can change and life is just the way it is. They look at themselves as unlucky ones. It is easy to recognize such people. There is no light in their eyes. Like a zombie, they lift their bodies from the bed in the morning, then they bring it to the place of work, they let the time pass by just to go back to their cave, where they can self-medicate with drugs, food or alcohol. The pain never went away, they just gave up trying to change anything and decided to live with it. Nothing can be changed. The World is just an unfair place to be. Some people get lucky, some don’t – it’s just the way it is. Faint-hearted and timid only want everything to become the same again, and immediately so that they can live and think in the same familiar way.

However, there are people who search for answers. They continuously ask themselves: “Why do I live? What is the purpose of my life?”. They believe that the Universe is unfair to them and they go against it. Like those who gave up, they don’t find the answers either. However, sooner or later they get tired of the fight and a defining moment comes. It gets really dark and they stop asking. They answer themselves. They realize that they are not the ones, who should be asking, but the ones who are being asked. The Universe gives them a choice – to be anyone or anything they want to be in life. The ultimate gift that the human being has – is the freedom of choice. 

He realizes that this is it – a defining moment. He has a choice: give up and accept the things as they are OR go against God and challenges his own fate. At the very moment when he chose to fight he died. The old himself had died and taken the old story with him into the grave. 

A new person is born. The new story had begun. Old memories are still there, however, he doesn’t associate with them. They happened to the old himself. The brave man brought to the fire all the former and, even at the cost of incredible heartache – renounce everything, including God, and goes forward. And the Lord smiles…. He watches over him, for this is exactly what he wanted: that everyone takes responsibility for his own life. God endowed his son with a truly invaluable gift – the ability to choose one of many decisions and act according to it.