Sunday, October 29, 2006
Eleven Minutes - Paulo Coelho
i stood for a long time by the roller coaster, and i noticed that most people get on it in search of excitement, but once it starts, they are terrified and want the cars to stop.What do they expect? Having chosen adventure, shouldn't they be prepared to go the whole way? or do they think that the intelligent thing to do would be to avoid the ups and downs and spend all their time on a carousel, going round and round on the spot?
The roller coaster is my life; life is a fast, dizzying game; life is a parachute jump; it's taking chances, it's wanting to get to the very top of yourself and to feel angry and dissatisfied when you don't manage it.
Human beings can withstand a week without water, two weeks without food, many years of homelessness, but not loneliness. It is the worst of all tortures, the worst of all sufferings.
And if that is what happens, if i have already lost him, I will at least have gained one very happy day in my life. Considering the way the world is, one happy day is almost a miracle.
Love is not to be found in someone else, but in ourselves; we simply awaken it. But in order to do that, we need the other person. The universe only makes sense when we have someone to share our feelings with.
Passion makes a person stop eating, sleeping, working, feeling at peace. A lot of people are frightened because, when it appears, it demolishes all the old things it finds in its path.
No one wants their life thrown into chaos. That is why a lot of people keep that threat under control, and are somehow capable of sustaining a house or a structure that is already rotten. They are the engineers of the superseded.
Other people think exactly the opposite: they surrender themselves without a second thought, hoping to find in passion the solutions to all their problems. They make the other person responsible for their happiness and blame them for their unhappiness. They are either euphoric because something marvellous has happened or depressed because something unexpected has just ruined everything.
Keep passion at bay or surrendering blindly to it - which of these two attitudes is the least destructive?
Profound desire, true desire is the desire to be close to someone. From that point onwards, things change, the man and the woman come into play, but what happens before - the attraction that brought them together- is impossible to explain. It is untouched desire in its purest state.
When desire is still in this pure state, the man and the woman fall in love with life, they live each moment reverently, consciously, always ready to celebrate the next blessing.
When people feel like this, they are not in a hurry, they do not precipitate events with unthinking actions. They know that the inevitable will happen, that what is real always finds a way of revealing itself. When the moment comes, they do not hesitate, they do not miss an opportunity, they do not let slip a single magic moment, because they respect the importance of each second.
Quote from Plato "At the beginning of creation, men and women were not as they are now; there was just one being, who was rather short, with a body and a neck, but his head had two faces, looking in different directions. It was as if two creatures had been glued back to back, with two sets of sex organs, four legs and four arms.
The Greek gods, however, were jealous, because this creature with four arms could work harder; with its two faces, it was always vigilant and could not be taken by surprise; and its four legs meant that it could stand or walk for long periods at a time without tiring. Even more dangerous was the fact that the creature had two different sets of sex organs and so needed no one else in order to continue reproducing.
Zeus, the supreme lord of Olympus, said:"I have a plan to make these mortals lose some of their strength."
And he cut the creature in two with a lightning bolt, thus creating man and woman. this greatly increased the population of the world, and, at the same time, disoriented and weakened its inhabitants, because now they had to search for their lost half and embrace it and, in that embrace, regain their former strength, their ability to avoid betrayal and the stamina to walk for long periods of time and to withstand hard work. That embrace in which the two bodies re-fuse to become one again is what we call sex."
A bird like that must fly free and feed on nostalgia for the time he flew aside someone else.
In all the languages in the world, there is the same proverb:"What the eyes don't see, the heart doesn't grieve over." Well, I say that there isn't an ounce of truth in it. The further off they are, the closer to the heart are all those feelings that we try to repress and forget. If we're in exile, we want to store away every tiny memory of our roots. If we're far from the person we love, everyone we pass in the street reminds us of them.
They kissed in public and a few people shot them scandalised looks; but they both smiled at the unease they were causing and at the dsires they were provoking by their scandalous behaviour, because they knew that, in fact, those people wished they could be doing the same thing. That was the real scandal.
Yes, I love you very much, as I have never loved another man, and that is precisely why I am leaving, because, if I stayed, the dreams would become reality, the desire to possess, to want your life to be mine... in short, all the things that transform love into slavery. It's best left like this-a dream. We have to be careful what we take from a country, or from life.
~*~SpRiNg * tAmZ~*~ bloomed 
10/29/2006 08:13:00 pm.
10/29/2006 08:13:00 pm.