Page 14 - The Alchemist - Paulo Coelho

The old man said nothing.

“Will you give me your blessing?” asked the boy. “You have helped me.” The man
continued to prepare his tea, saying nothing. Then he turned to the boy.

“I am proud of you,” he said. “You brought a new feeling into my crystal shop. But you
know that I’m not going to go to Mecca. Just as you know that you’re not going to buy
your sheep.”

“Who told you that?” asked the boy, startled.

“Maktub” said the old crystal merchant.

And he gave the boy his blessing.

I’m going to go back to doing just what I did before, the boy thought. Even though the
sheep didn’t teach me to speak Arabic.

But the sheep had taught him something even more important: that there was a language
in the world that everyone understood, a language the boy had used throughout the time
that he was trying to improve things at the shop. It was the language of enthusiasm, of
things accomplished with love and purpose, and as part of a search for something
believed in and desired. Tangier was no longer a strange city, and he felt that, just as he
had conquered this place, he could conquer the world.

“When you want something, all the universe conspires to help you achieve it,” the old
king had said.

From where he stood, he saw for the first time that the old merchant’s hair was very
much like the hair of the old king. He remembered the smile of the candy seller, on his
first day in Tangier, when he had nothing to eat and nowhere to go—that smile had also
been like the old king’s smile.
“But I’m going back to the fields that I know, to take care of my flock again.” He said
that to himself with certainty, but he was no longer happy with his decision. He had
worked for an entire year to make a dream come true, and that dream, minute by minute,
was becoming less important. Maybe because that wasn’t really his dream.

Who knows...maybe it’s better to be like the crystal merchant: never go to Mecca, and
just go through life wanting to do so, he thought, again trying to convince himself.

The hills of Andalusia were only two hours away, but there was an entire desert between
him and the Pyramids. Yet the boy felt that there was another way to regard his situation: