The Zahir

by Paulo Coelho

All you have to do is to pay attention; lessons always arrive when you are ready, and if you can read the signs, you will learn everything you need to know in order to take the next step.

I love this!!! It's been my motto my whole life... but now I see it from a different perspective ... I turn it inwards for my writing...

“Some people appear to be happy, but they simply don’t give the matter much thought. Others make plans: I’m going to have a husband, a home, two children, a house in the country. As long as they’re busy doing that, they’re like bulls looking for the bullfighter: they react instinctively, they blunder on, with no idea where the target is. They get their car, sometimes they even get a Ferrari, and they think that’s the meaning of life, and they never question it. Yet their eyes betray the sadness that even they don’t know they carry in their soul. Are you happy?”

Profound and so very very true...Are you happy?

On the way back to Paris—in far more favorable weather conditions—I am in a kind of trance: I do not think, I merely concentrate on the traffic. When I get home, I ask the maid not to let anyone in, and ask her if she can sleep over for the next few nights and make me breakfast, lunch, and supper. I stamp on the small apparatus that connects me to the Internet, destroying it completely. I unplug the telephone. I put my cell phone in a box and send it to my publisher, saying that he should only give it back to me when I come around personally to pick it up.

Can you imagine if we were able to do that today? Bring in the coffee and food and regular intervals. I'm on a need-to-know basis!