My favorite passage from Paulo Coelho’s book The Pilgrimage; a must read for dreamers

The following Paulo Coelho Passage from The Pilgrimage is one of the most amazing passages I have ever read about fighting for our dreams and overcoming the many obstacles in life.  I read it while in Spain; it inspired me to begin my own Pilgrimage and travel to the sacred Cathedral of Saint James in Northern Spain.  Enjoy…                                   

“It is the pleasure of searching and the pleasure of the adventure.  You are nourishing something that’s very important-your dreams.  We must never stop dreaming.  Dreams provide nourishment for the soul, just as a meal does for the body.  Many times in our lives we see our dreams shattered and our desires frustrated, but we have to continue dreaming.  If we don’t, our soul dies… …

The Good fight is the one we fight because our heart asks it of us…                         

 …The Good fight is the one that’s fought in the name of our dreams.  When we’re young our dreams first explode inside us with all of their force, we are very courageous, but we haven’t yet learned how to fight.  With great effort, we learn how to fight, but by then we no longer have the courage to go into combat.  So we turn against ourselves and do battle within.  We become our own worst enemy.  We say that our dreams were childish, or too difficult to realize, or the result or our not having known enough about life.  We kill our dreams because we are afraid to fight the good fight.                                                                                 

The first symptom of the process of killing our dreams is lack of time… The Busiest people I have known in my life always have time enough to do everything.  Those who do nothing are always tired and pay no attention to the little amount of work they are required to do. They complain constantly that the day is too short.  The Truth is, they are afraid to fight the good fight…                                                                                                                                

The second symptom of the death of our dreams lies in our certainties.  Because we don’t want to see life as a grand adventure, we begin to think of ourselves as wise and fair and correct in asking so little of life.    We look beyond the walls of our day-to-day existence, and we hear the sound of lances breaking, we smell the dust and the sweat, and we see the great defeats and the fire in the eyes of the warriors.  But we never see the delight, the immense delight in the hearts of those engaged in the battle.  For them, neither victory nor defeat is important; what’s important is only that they are fighting the good fight.                           

 And, finally, the third symptom of the passing of our dreams is peace.  Life becomes a Sunday afternoon; we ask for nothing grand, and we cease to demand anything more than we are willing to give.  In that state we think of ourselves as being mature; we put aside the fantasies of our youth, and we seek personal and professional achievement.  We are surprised when people our age say that they still want this or that out of life.  But really, deep in our hearts, we know that what has happened is that we have renounced the battle for our dreams-we have refused to fight the good fight.                                                                              

When we renounce our dreams and find peace, we go through a period of tranquility.  But the dead dreams begin to rot within us and to infect our entire being.  We become cruel to those around us, and then we begin to direct this cruelty against ourselves…What we sought to avoid in combat-disappointment and defeat-came upon us because of our cowardice.  And one day, the dead, spoiled dreams make it difficult to breath, and we actually seek death.  It’s death that frees us from out certainties, from our work, and from that terrible peace of Sunday afternoons.”  The Pilgrimage by Paulo Coelho P. 58