It surely is a sign that something is off in your life when you read a book about how crystals and omens can show you your path towards happiness and you start looking sideways at every pebble on your daily commute.
The initiated might have guessed it already. A couple of weeks ago I picked up The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho at my local library, the book that has supposedly transformed the lives of countless readers across generations. After years of seeing the book referenced as the source text for seemingly deep but upon closer inspection meaningless quotes as part of movie preludes, the cover looked sufficiently bright and summery for me to take it home (I really do judge a book by its cover).
Or perhaps picking up the book was the first ‘omen’ that I was somehow at a crossroads in life. To be honest, identifying that I needed life advice wasn’t rocket science. Only a few months ago I thought smugly that I hadn’t yet written about my boyfriend in this blog. Our love story simply didn’t have enough conflict to make for a sufficiently dramatic narrative arc: We met each other. We liked each other. We told each other. We’ve been together ever since. Happy ever after.
But then in came year 9 of our fairy tale, an aging parent and a sense of duty towards family in my boyfriend that I admired in theory but struggled with in practice if it meant moving from bustling London to a non-place on the Southernmost tip of Europe in Andalucía where the standard response to requesting a vegetarian dish is chicken and 6 months of the year is guaranteed sunshine and 25+ degrees (aka my personal idea of HELL).
Aside from our fairy tale beginnings, it had always been a point of pride for me that we didn’t fall into tropes of couple-y co-dependence. We live together but we each do our own cooking, washing, cleaning, we go on holidays together but also by ourselves and we’ve repeatedly agreed not to get married. I love the fact that staying together feels like an active choice every day because there are not many structures or contracts that make it difficult to separate. (I mean I’m eating leftover Udon noodles from a hip place near Hackesche Höfe in Berlin for breakfast in my hotel room as I write this. For lunch I’ll probably have a Crookie, i.e. a cross between a croissant and a cookie. Can’t you tell how edgy and unconventional I am?).
However, being this non-committed and guided by our active choosing rather than relationship-autopilot massively sucked when the visions for our future started to diverge. With my boss’ decision on whether I will be allowed to work from Spain still pending, I found myself wondering what I should wish for. I was ready to leave London and I wanted to stay together. But I knew that I would become the worst version of myself if I lived in a place I didn’t like with a bunch of family obligations as garnish to top it all off. Imagine we had gotten married when we met and I’d adopted the traditional role of complete devotion to my husband’s needs and wishes. Following him to the end of Europe to meet his obligations as a loving son would be self-evident. Or imagine if we had had children by now, some already in school in the UK. Moving our family to the detriment of our children’s education would be out of the question. But without those guiding lines, I was left with The Alchemist’s widely touted life lessons instead.
The book tells the story of Santiago, a shepherd boy who lives in Southern Spain not far from where we’d be moving (a first omen?!). Santiago fancies a village girl. But one night he dreams of finding a treasure by the pyramids in Egypt. So, he abandons her because finding the treasure aka becoming filthy rich is his true calling in life and anyhow, she’ll still be there when he gets back from his intrepid adventures.
He meets an old man/king who encourages him to follow his destiny and the ‘omens’ that guide him and gives him two precious stones that will supposedly help him see the signs on his way to the treasure.
Then he fancies a desert girl. But he abandons her also to continue the search for his treasure. She’s a desert girl after all and used to men leaving, so she’ll still be there when he gets back also.
Another older man (the alchemist, but despite the book’s title, that somehow feels beside the point) tells him to stick with the omens to fulfil his de$tiny.
He gets to the pyramids. A random guy beats him up. The boy realises his treasure was always buried beneath the tree where he had been sleeping back in the South of Spain. On Wikipedia I read that realising what you were looking for was always in your reach is a famous fairy tale trope, but I somehow expected this to mean that Santiago would realise that the true treasure is in immaterial things like being with the people he loves. However, when Santiago goes back, he literally digs up a chest of Spanish gold coins and returns to live with the desert girl. The end.
Deep in my heart, I knew that the book was utter crap and that unless you are a young shepherd who has no real commitment to anyone or anything and doesn’t seem to live in a world in which people care about their next meal / shelter / others, the only valuable (literally) insight from the book is that if you find a chest of Spanish gold coins, no matter what you decide to do after, you’ll be fine. I guess that’s also what appealed to the likes of Bill Clinton and Julia Roberts who are mentioned as fans of the book in the introduction. Endless funds in the bank are a good insurance policy in case all those crystals and omens don’t work out for you.
A few days after finishing the book, I came to a halt outside a New Age shop with massive glittering rocks on display in Prenzlauer Berg in Berlin. (The kind of neighbourhood where people are willing to queue for Australian brunch on an empty stomach).
Warning: The next lines will be cheesy, especially for those with a German tolerance for sappiness with bad puns thrown in for good measure but what can I do, this is what happened.
Having spent the weekend talking things over with my three closest school friends during our Berlin reunion and hearing how they navigate life, it became crystal clear (I warned you) that it was absurd to look for answers in crystals and omens when no matter where in this world I’ll end up, I’ll be fine as long as I can be with my people. Going it the Anti-Alchemist way, if you think about it.
“So girls, next stop Andalucía?”
In case you are still considering reading this horrid book, please find a collection of ridiculous excerpts below featuring patronising ‘wisdoms’ that infuriatingly contradict each other:
The first set of quotes fall into the category of ‘you’ve got to do what you’ve got to do, fuck everyone else, don’t be a chicken’:
- “There is only one thing that makes a dream impossible to achieve: the fear of failure.”
- “At a certain point in our lives, we lose control of what’s happening to us, and our lives become controlled by fate. That’s the world’s greatest lie.”
- “We know what we want to do, but are afraid of hurting those around us by abandoning everything in order to pursue our dream. We do not realize that love is just a further impetus, not something that will prevent us going forward, and that those who genuinely wish us well want us to be happy and are prepared to accompany us on that journey”
At the same time, the book gives a bunch of recommendations that suggest that with the right attitude, you can deal with anything and find happiness anywhere, so you don’t need to follow your calling after all?!?!?!:
- “If you pay attention to the present, you can improve upon it. And, if you improve on the present, what comes later will also be better. Forget about the future, and live each day according to the teachings, confident that God loves his children. Each day, in itself, brings with it an eternity.”
- “When each day is the same as the next, it’s because people fail to recognize the good things that happen in their lives every day that the sun rises.
- “The universe is conspiring in our favour, even though we may not understand how.”
And then to top it all off, the idea that it doesn’t really matter what you do because you can’t control or predict what happens in the future:
- “When someone makes a decision, he is really diving into a strong current that will carry him to places he had never dreamed of when he first made the decision.”
That last one is really a perfect summary of what it felt like to read The Alchemist. And who knows, perhaps after a few months in Spain, I’ll be a chicken-devouring, sun-bathing convert. I guess you’ll have to stick around to find out.