In the last few years I haven’t been that interested in reading fiction. I guess I had lost my interest in fairy tales and things which simply are not real or actual. But for some reason I recently picked up a book called The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho. I was compelled to read this book out of nowhere, can’t really explain it, but the story within The Alchemist explained the reason to me.
The Alchemist is a story about living your dreams, searching out your destiny and believing in what you can’t always see. It’s faith really, faith in yourself and that your purpose for living has meaning. “When you want something, all the universe conspires in helping you to achieve your dream” is, in my opinion, the central message within The Alchemist.
If one believes in the Law of Attraction and therefore, the things you want and have faith in will be attracted to you, then The Alchemist is part of the manifestation of what I attracted to me. In the last few years I have stepped more and more away from the boundaries I had placed around me – I have achieved things of which I had only imagined or ‘dreamed’ of, but never really truly considered that I would do them. When I was diagnosed with ADHD and understood my lifelong struggles for what they actually were, the chains of mediocrity and unfaithfulness started to loosen from around my heart. Day by day those chains disintegrate even further.
In The Alchemist, Paulo advises that everyone has their very own personal legend, a dream for which they will follow, which, in fact, is the reason you and I were born. Paulo uses the story to demonstrate, in the form of a fable, how the signs (omens) are around us all the time; we simply have to have faith in our dreams so that we can ‘see’ them. Paulo doesn’t attempt to promise us anything, he simply seems to be seeking to open our minds to the possibilities of something more.
It is clear to me that my book “One Boy’s Struggle: A Memoir – Surviving Life with Undiagnosed ADD” is much more than I had considered and that I was writing about my very own personal legend and how I have always been in search of my destiny. Paulo illustrates in The Alchemist how tragedy and struggles play a part in our search, that without those struggles we would never truly find ‘our way’. This, I believe, is the reason I decided to write not only my story, but also write what could have helped and the ‘how’ of how I improved and overcame my struggles. The story of my life growing up with undiagnosed ADD, and the repercussions thereof, is the memoir part of it; however, I use the story to illustrate a roadmap for positive outcomes, and warnings, which others can follow to avoid many of the mistakes which were either made by me or by others due to the confusions of misunderstanding the core reality of my struggles.
In my book I talk about certain people I have met and how they helped me indirectly throughout my life – I wrote about “when the student is ready, the master appears” – Once again, the master has appeared and this time in the form of a fable, The Alchemist. There has been something I have wanted to do for a very long time, let me stress this: very, very long time, and only now, at this point in my life, is it time to achieve yet another dream. By reading The Alchemist, my mind has been awakened to the ‘how’, even though I understood the ‘why’ already and I have found The Alchemist to be an omen in of itself to me. The right things, at the right times, have always happened in my life and somehow I already knew that, even if I didn’t ‘understand’ that.
“When you want something, all the universe conspires in helping you to achieve your dream.”
Paulo Coelho – The Alchemist
~Bryan
