Like the Flowing River: Thoughts and Reflections

by Paulo Coelho

  I never saw the couple again.

  The Second Chance

  ‘I’ve always been fascinated by the story of the Sybilline books,’ I said to Mônica, my friend and literary agent, while we were driving to Portugal, ‘which is about the importance of seizing every opportunity while it’s there, and how if you don’t, it’s lost for ever.’

  The Sibyls, who were prophetesses capable of foreseeing the future, lived in Ancient Rome. One day, one of them came to the Emperor Tiberius’ palace bearing nine books. She claimed that they contained the future of the Empire and asked for ten gold talents in payment. Tiberius thought this far too expensive and refused to buy them.

  The Sibyl left, burned three of the books, and returned with the remaining six. ‘They still cost ten gold talents,’ she said. Tiberius laughed and sent her away. How did she have the nerve to sell six books for the price of nine?

  The Sibyl burned three more of the books and went back to Tiberius with the three remaining volumes. ‘They still cost ten gold talents,’ she said. Intrigued, Tiberius ended up buying the three volumes, but he could only read in them a little of what the future held.

  When I had finished telling the story, I realized that we were passing through Ciudad Rodrigo, close to the border between Spain and Portugal. There, four years earlier, I had been offered a book, but had declined to buy it.

  ‘Let’s stop here. I think that remembering the Sybilline books was a sign for me to put right a mistake I made in the past.’

  During the first tour I made of Europe publicizing my books, I had had lunch in Ciudad Rodrigo. Afterwards, I visited the cathedral and met a priest. ‘Doesn’t the inside of the church look lovely in the afternoon sun,’ he said. I liked this remark; we talked a little, and he showed me round the church’s altars and cloisters and inner gardens. In the end, he offered me a book he had written about the church, but I chose not to buy it. When I left, I felt guilty; after all, I’m a writer, and there I was in Europe trying to sell my work, so why not buy the priest’s book out of solidarity? Then I forgot all about the episode, until that moment.

  I stopped the car, and Mônica and I walked across the square in front of the church, where a woman was looking up at the sky.

  ‘Good afternoon,’ I said, ‘I’m looking for a priest who wrote a book about this church.’

  ‘Oh, you mean Father Stanislau. He died a year ago,’ she replied.

  I felt terribly sad. Why had I not given Father Stanislau the same joy I feel whenever I see someone reading one of my own books?

  ‘He was one of the kindest men I’ve ever known,’ the woman went on. ‘He came from a very humble family, but became an expert in archaeology. He helped my son get a grant to go to university.’

  I told her why I was there.

  ‘Don’t go blaming yourself over a trifle like that, my dear,’ she said. ‘Go and visit the church again.’

  I thought this was a sign too and so I did as she said. There was only one priest in the confessional, waiting for the faithful who did not come. I went over to him and he indicated that I should kneel down, but I said:

  ‘No, I don’t want to confess. I just came to buy a book about this church by a man called Stanislau.’

  The priest’s eyes lit up. He left the confessional and returned minutes later with a copy of the book.

  ‘How wonderful that you should come here just for this,’ he said. ‘I’m Father Stanislau’s brother, and it makes me really proud. He must be in heaven now, glad to see that his work is considered so important.’

  Of all the priests I could have met, I had come across Stanislau’s brother. I paid for the book, thanked him, and he embraced me. As I turned to leave, I heard him say:

  ‘Doesn’t the inside of the church look lovely in the afternoon sun!’

  These were the same words that Father Stanislau had said four years before. Life always gives us a second chance.

  The Australian and the Newspaper Ad

  I’m in Sydney harbour, looking at the beautiful bridge that joins the two halves of the city, when an Australian comes up to me and asks me to read an advertisement in the newspaper.

  ‘The print is too small,’ he says. ‘I can’t make out what it says.’

  I try, but I haven’t got my reading glasses with me. I apologize to the man.

  ‘Oh, that’s all right,’ he says. ‘Do you know something? I think that God suffers from poor eyesight too, not because He’s old, but because that’s how He wants it to be. That way, when someone does something wrong, He can always say He couldn’t quite see, and so ends up forgiving the person because He doesn’t want to commit an injustice.’

  ‘And what if someone does something good?’ I ask.

  ‘Ah, well,’ laughs the Australian, moving off, ‘God, of course, never leaves His glasses at home!’

  The Tears of the Desert

  A friend of mine returns from Morocco with a beautiful story about a missionary who, as soon as he arrived in Marrakesh, decided that he would go for a walk every morning in the desert that lay just outside the city. The first time he did this, he noticed a man lying down, with his ear pressed to the ground and stroking the sand with one hand.

  ‘He’s obviously mad,’ the missionary said to himself.

  But the scene was repeated every day, and after a month, intrigued by this strange behaviour, he decided to speak to the stranger. With great difficulty, since he was not yet fluent in Arabic, he knelt down by his side.

  ‘What are you doing?’

  ‘I’m keeping the desert company and offering it consolation for its loneliness and its tears.’

  ‘I didn’t know the desert was capable of tears.’

  ‘It weeps every day because it dreams of being useful to people, and of being transformed into a vast garden where they could grow cereal crops and flowers and graze sheep.’

  ‘Well, tell the desert that it is performing an important duty,’ said the missionary. ‘Whenever I walk in the desert, I understand man’s true size, because its vast open space reminds me of how small we are compared with God. When I look at its sands, I imagine all the millions of people in the world who were born equal, even if the world has not always been fair to all of them. Its mountains help me to meditate, and when I see the sun coming up over the horizon, my soul fills with joy and I feel closer to the Creator.’

  The missionary left the man and returned to his daily tasks. Imagine his surprise when, next morning, he found the man in the same place and in the same position.

  ‘Did you tell the desert everything that I said?’

  The man nodded.

  ‘And it’s still weeping?’

  ‘I can hear every sob. Now it’s weeping because it has spent thousands of years thinking that it was completely useless and wasted all that time blaspheming against God and its own fate.’

  ‘Well, tell the desert that even though we human beings have a much shorter lifespan, we also spend much of our time thinking we’re useless. We rarely discover our true destiny, and feel that God has been unjust to us. When the moment finally comes, and something happens that reveals to us the reason we were born, we think it’s too late to change our life and continue to suffer, and, like the desert, blame ourselves for the time we have wasted.’

  ‘I don’t know if the desert will hear that,’ said the man. ‘He’s accustomed to pain, and can’t see things any other way.’

  ‘Let’s do what I always do when I sense that people have lost all hope. Let us pray.’

  The two men knelt down and prayed. One turned towards Mecca because he was a Muslim, and the other put his hands together in prayer because he was a Catholic. They each prayed to their own God, who has always been the same God, even though people insist on calling him by different names.

  The following day, when the missionary went for his usual morning walk, the man was no longer there. In the place where he used to embrace the earth, the sand seemed wet, for a small spring had started bubbling
up there. In the months that followed, the spring grew, and the inhabitants of the city built a well there.

  The Bedouin call the place ‘The Well of the Desert’s Tears’. They say that anyone who drinks from its waters will find a way of transforming the reason for his suffering into the reason for his joy, and will end up finding his true destiny.

  Rome: Isabella Returns from Nepal

  I meet Isabella in a restaurant where we usually go because it’s always empty, even though the food is excellent. She tells me that, during her trip to Nepal, she spent some weeks in a monastery. One afternoon, she was walking near the monastery with one of the monks, when he opened the bag he was carrying and stood for a long time studying its contents. Then he said to Isabella:

  ‘Did you know that bananas can teach you the meaning of life?’

  He took out a rotten banana from the bag and threw it away.

  ‘That is the life that has been and gone, and which was not used to the full and for which it is now too late.’

  Then he drew out another banana, which was still green. He showed it to her and put it back in the bag.

  ‘This is the life that has yet to happen, and for which we need to wait until the moment is right.’

  Finally, he took out a ripe banana, peeled it, and shared it with Isabella.

  ‘This is the present moment. Learn how to gobble it up without fear or guilt.’

  The Art of the Sword

  Many centuries ago, in the days of the Samurai, a book was written in Japan about the spiritual art of the sword: Impassive Understanding, also known as The Treatise of Tahlan, which was the name of its author (who was both a fencing master and a Zen monk). I have adapted a few sections below:

  Keeping calm. Anyone who understands the meaning of life knows that things have neither a beginning nor an end, and that there is, therefore, no point in worrying. Fight for what you believe in without trying to prove anything to anyone; maintain the same silent calm of someone who has had the courage to choose his own destiny.

  This applies to both love and war.

  Allowing your heart to be present. Anyone who trusts in his powers of seduction, in his ability to say the right thing at the right time, in the correct use of the body, becomes deaf to the ‘voice of the heart’. This can only be heard when we are in complete harmony with the world around us, and never when we judge ourselves to be the centre of the universe.

  This applies to both love and war.

  Learning to be the other person. We are so focused on what we judge to be the best attitude that we forget something very important: in order to attain our objectives, we need other people. It is necessary, therefore, not only to observe the world, but to imagine ourselves into the skins of other people, and to learn how to follow their thoughts.

  This applies to both love and war.

  Finding the right master. Our path will always cross that of other people who, out of love or pride, want to teach us something. How can we distinguish the friend from the manipulator? The answer is simple: the true teacher is not the one who teaches us the ideal path, but the one who shows us the many ways of reaching the road we need to travel if we are to find our destiny. Once we have found that road, the teacher cannot help us anymore, because its challenges are unique.

  This applies to neither love nor war, but unless we understand it, we will never get anywhere.

  Escaping from threats. We often think that the ideal attitude is that of giving up one’s life for a dream. Nothing could be further from the truth. In order to achieve a dream, we need to preserve our life, and we must, therefore, know how to avoid those things that threaten us. The more we plan our steps, the more chance there is that we will go wrong, because we are failing to take into consideration four things: other people, life’s teachings, passion, and calm. The more we feel we are in control of things, the farther off we are from controlling anything. A threat does not issue any warning, and a swift reaction cannot be planned like a Sunday afternoon walk.

  Therefore, if you want to be in harmony with your love or with your fight, learn to react rapidly. Through educated observation, do not allow your supposed experience of life to transform you into a machine. Use that experience to listen always to ‘the voice of the heart’. Even if you do not agree with what that voice is saying, respect it and follow its advice: it knows when to act and when to avoid action.

  This applies to both love and war.

  In the Blue Mountains

  The day after my arrival in Australia, my publisher takes me to a natural park close to Sydney. There, in the midst of the forest that covers an area known as the Blue Mountains, are three rock formations in the form of obelisks.

  ‘They’re the Three Sisters,’ my publisher says, and then tells me the following legend.

  A shaman was out walking with his three sisters when the most famous warrior of the time approached them and said:

  ‘I want to marry one of these lovely girls.’

  ‘If one of them marries, the other two will think they’re ugly. I’m looking for a tribe where warriors are allowed to have three wives,’ replied the shaman, moving off.

  For years, the shaman travelled the Australian continent, but never found that tribe.

  ‘At least one of us could have been happy,’ said one of the sisters, when they were old and tired of all that walking.

  ‘I was wrong,’ said the shaman, ‘but now it’s too late.’

  And he transformed the three sisters into blocks of stone, so that anyone who passed by there would understand that the happiness of one does not mean the unhappiness of the others.

  The Taste of Success

  A rash Hejazi, my Iranian publisher, tells a story about a man who, in his search for spiritual enlightenment, decided to climb a high mountain dressed only in his normal clothes and to spend the rest of his life there meditating.

  He realized at once that one change of clothing wouldn’t be enough because his clothes soon became dirty. He came down the mountain, went to the nearest village and begged them to give him some more clothes. Since they all knew he was a man in search of enlightenment, they gave him a new pair of trousers and a new shirt.

  The man thanked them and went back up to the hermitage he was building on top of the mountain. He spent his nights building the walls and his days in meditation. He ate the fruit from the trees, and drank the water from a nearby spring.

  A month later, he discovered that a mouse was nibbling away at his spare set of clothes, which he had left out to dry. Since he wanted to concentrate exclusively on his spiritual duties, he went down to the village again and asked them to get him a cat. The villagers, who respected his search for spiritual enlightenment, found him a cat.

  Seven days later, the cat was close to starvation because it could not live on fruit alone and there were no more mice around. The man went back to the village in search of milk. The villagers knew that the milk was not for him and that he was surviving without eating anything apart from what Nature provided, and so, once again, they helped him.

  The cat soon finished the milk, and the man asked the villagers to lend him a cow. Since the cow gave more milk than the cat could drink, the man started drinking it too, so as not to waste it. Soon, by dint of breathing good mountain air, eating fruit, meditating, drinking milk, and doing exercise, he was transformed into a very handsome specimen indeed. A young woman, who had gone up the mountain in search of a sheep, fell in love with him and persuaded him that he needed a wife to take care of the household duties, leaving him free to meditate in peace.

  Three years later, the man was married with two children, three cows, and an orchard and was running a meditation centre, with a long waiting list of people wanting to visit the ‘Temple of Eternal Youth’.

  When someone asked him how it had all started, he said:

  ‘I arrived here with only two items of clothing, and when I had been here for two weeks, a mouse started nibbling one of them and…’

 
But no one was interested in the end of the story; they were sure that he was simply an astute businessman trying to invent a legend that would justify him putting up the price of a stay at the temple still more.

  The Tea Ceremony

  In Japan, I took part in a tea ceremony. You go into a small room, tea is served, and that’s it really, except that everything is done with so much ritual and ceremony that a banal daily event is transformed into a moment of communion with the universe.

  The tea master, Okakura Kakuzo, explains what happens:

  ‘The ceremony is a way of worshipping the beautiful and the simple. All one’s efforts are concentrated on trying to achieve perfection through the imperfect gestures of daily life. Its beauty consists in the respect with which it is performed. If a mere cup of tea can bring us closer to God, we should watch out for all the other dozens of opportunities that each ordinary day offers us.’

  The Cloud and the Sand Dune

  ‘As everyone knows, the life of a cloud is very busy and very short,’ writes Bruno Ferrero. And here’s a related story.

  A young cloud was born in the midst of a great storm over the Mediterranean Sea, but he did not even have time to grow up there, for a strong wind pushed all the clouds over towards Africa.

  As soon as the clouds reached the continent, the climate changed. A bright sun was shining in the sky and, stretched out beneath them, lay the golden sands of the Sahara. Since it almost never rains in the desert, the wind continued pushing the clouds towards the forests in the south.

  Meanwhile, as happens with young humans too, the young cloud decided to leave his parents and his older friends in order to discover the world.