The bird and the cage...

from paulo coelho blog

November 10, 2010 by Paulo Coelho

From Maria’s diary:

Once upon a time, there was a bird. He was adorned with two perfect wings and with glossy, colorful, marvelous feathers.

One day, a woman saw this bird and fell in love with him.
She invited the bird to fly with her, and the two travelled across the sky in perfect harmony. She admired and venerated and celebrated that bird.
But then she thought: He might want to visit far-off mountains!
And she was afraid, afraid that she would never feel the same way about any other bird.

And she thought: “I’m going to set a trap. The next time the bird appears, he will never leave again.”
The bird, who was also in love, returned the following day, fell into the trap and was put in a cage.

She looked at the bird every day. There he was, the object of her passion, and she showed him to her friends, who said: “Now you have everything you could possibly want.”

However, a strange transformation began to take place: now that she had the bird and no longer needed to woo him, she began to lose interest.

The bird, unable to fly and express the true meaning of his life, began to waste away and his feathers to lose their gloss; he grew ugly; and the woman no longer paid him any attention, except by feeding him and cleaning out his cage.

One day, the bird died. The woman felt terribly sad and spent all her time thinking about him. But she did not remember the cage, she thought only of the day when she had seen him for the first time, flying contentedly amongst the clouds.

If she had looked more deeply into herself, she would have realized that what had thrilled her about the bird was his freedom, the energy of his wings in motion, not his physical body.

Without the bird, her life too lost all meaning, and Death came knocking at her door.
“Why have you come?” she asked Death.
“So that you can fly once more with him across the sky,” Death replied.

“If you had allowed him to come and go, you would have loved and admired him ever more; alas, you now need me in order to find him again.”

In “Eleven Minutes”

Anxiety

Posted by Paulo Coelho

There is nothing wrong with anxiety.Although we cannot control God’s time, it is part of the human condition to want to receive the thing we are waiting for as quickly as possible.Or to drive away whatever is causing our fear.That is so from childhood onwards, until we reach the age when we become indifferent to life. Because as long as we are intensely connected to the present moment, we will always be waiting anxiously for someone or something.How can you tell a passionate heart to be still and contemplate the miracles of Creation in silence, free of tension, fear and unanswerable questions?Anxiety is part of love, and should not be blamed because of that.How can you tell someone not to worry when he has invested his money and his life in a dream and has yet to see any results? The farmer cannot speed the progress of the seasons in order to pick the fruit he planted, but he waits impatiently for the coming of autumn and harvest-time.How can you ask a warrior not to feel anxious before a battle?He has trained to the point of exhaustion for that moment, he has given of his best, and while he believes he is prepared, he fears that all his efforts could prove to be in vain.Anxiety was born in the very same moment as mankind. And since we will never be able to master it, we will have to learn to live with it – just as we have learned to live with storms. 

 taken from MANUSCRIPT FOUND IN ACCRA

To succeed...

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To succeed we must answer a very simple question, several times a day: "why am I doing this?"

Life is too short...

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Life is too short to spend another day behaving like a victim

Hide your craziness

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The life is ..

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Good  morning and Don't forget :
There is life  BEFORE Death !

Fight for your dream and your dream will fight for you

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The importance of repeating the same thing

The importance of repeating the same thing

Posted by Paulo Coelho

An action is a thought that manifests itself.A small gesture denounces us, so we have to make everything perfect, think about the details, learn the technique so that it becomes intuitive.Intuition has nothing to do with routine but rather with a state of spirit that lies beyond technique.So, after practicing a lot, we no longer think about all the necessary movements: they become part of our very existence. But for this to happen, you have to train and repeat.And as if that were not enough, you have to repeat and train.Watch a good blacksmith working the steel. To the untrained eye he is repeating the same hammer blows over and over again.But those who know the importance of training know that each time the hammer is raised and then lowered, the intensity of the blow is different. The hand repeats the same gesture but as it approaches the iron it knows whether to touch it harder or softer.Look at the windmill. Whoever sees its vanes just once imagines that it always turns with the same speed, always repeating the same movement. But those who know windmills know that they are conditioned to the wind and change their direction whenever necessary.The hand of the ironsmith was trained after the gesture of hammering was repeated thousands of times.Windmill vanes can move fast after the wind has blown a lot and polished their gears.The archer lets many an arrow pass far from the target because he knows that he will only learn the importance of the bow, posture, the string and the target after he repeats his gestures thousands of times without being afraid of making a mistake.Training is NOT routine. It is essential

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The story of pencil

Paulo Coelho's Blog

The story of the pencil

Posted by Paulo Coelho

A boy was watching his grandmother write a letter. At one point he asked:
‘Are you writing a story about what we’ve done? Is it a story about me?’His grandmother stopped writing her letter and said to her grandson:I am writing about you, actually, but more important than the words is the pencil I’m using.
I hope you will be like this pencil when you grow up.’Intrigued, the boy looked at the pencil. It didn’t seem very special.‘But it’s just like any other pencil I’ve ever seen!’‘That depends on how you look at things.
It has five qualities which, if you manage to hang on them, will make you a person who is always at peace with the world.

’‘First quality: you are capable of great things, but you must never forget that there is a hand guiding your steps. We call that hand God, and He always guides us according to His will.

’‘Second quality: now and then, I have to stop writing and use a sharpner. That makes the pencil suffer a little, but afterwards, he’s much sharper. So you, too, must learn to bear certain pains and sorrows, because they will make you a better person.

‘Third quality: the pencil always allows us to use an eraser to rub out any mistakes. This means that correcting something we did is not necessarily a bad thing; it helps to keep us on the road to justice.

’‘Fourth quality: what really matters in a pencil is not its wooden exterior, but the graphite inside. So always pay attention to what is happening inside you.

’‘Finally, the pencil’s fifth quality: it always leaves a mark. in just the same way, you should know that everything you do in life will leave a mark, so try to be conscious of that in your every action’source: 

“Like the Flowing River” by Paulo Coelho

Love is...

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