Paulo Coelho - Aleph

“Look, J., despite all my efforts, I still can’t honestly say that I feel closer to God and to myself,” I tell him, with barely concealed exasperation.

“That’s because, like everyone else on the planet, you believed that time would teach you to grow closer to God. But time doesn’t teach; it merely brings us a sense of weariness and of growing older.”

The oak tree in my garden appears to be looking at me now. It must be more than four hundred years old, and the only thing it has learned is to stay in one place.

“Why did we go and perform that ritual around that other oak tree? How does that help us become better human beings?”

“Precisely because most people don’t perform rituals around oak trees anymore, and because by performing apparently absurd rituals, you get in touch with something deep in your soul, in the oldest part of yourself, the part closest to the origin of everything.”

That’s true. I asked a question to which I already knew the answer and received the answer I was expecting. I should make better use of his company.

“It’s time to leave,” says J. abruptly.

I look at the clock. I tell him that the airport is nearby and that we can continue talking for a while longer.

“That isn’t what I mean. When I went through what you’re experiencing now, I found the answer in something that had happened before I was born. That’s what I’m suggesting you do now.”

Reincarnation? But he had always discouraged me from visiting past lives.

“I’ve been back into the past already. I learned how to do that before I met you. We’ve talked before about how I saw two incarnations, one as a French writer in the nineteenth century and one—”

“Yes, I know.”

“I made mistakes then that I can’t put right now. And you told me never to go back again, because it would only increase my sense of guilt. Traveling to past lives is like making a hole in the floor and letting the flames of the fire in the apartment below scorch and burn the present.”

J. throws what remains of his pear to the birds in the garden and looks at me with some irritation.

“If you don’t stop spouting such nonsense, I might start believing that you’re right and that you really haven’t learned anything during the twenty-four years we’ve been together.”

I know what he means. In magic—and in life—there is only the present moment, the now . You can’t measure time the way you measure the distance between two points. “Time” doesn’t pass. We human beings have enormous difficulty in focusing on the present; we’re always thinking about what we did, about how we could have done it better, about the consequences of our actions, and about why we didn’t act as we should have. Or else we think about the future, about what we’re going to do tomorrow, what precautions we should take, what dangers await us around the next corner, how to avoid what we don’t want and how to get what we have always dreamed of.

J. takes up the conversation again.

“Right here and now, you are beginning to wonder: is there really something wrong? Yes, there is. But at this precise moment, you also realize that you can change your future by bringing the past into the present. Past and future exist only in our memory. The present moment, though, is outside of time, it’s Eternity. In India, they use the word ‘karma,’ for lack of any better term. But it’s a concept that’s rarely given a proper explanation. It isn’t what you did in the past that will affect the present. It’s what you do in the present that will redeem the past and thereby change the future.”

“So…”

He pauses, becoming increasingly irritated at my inability to grasp what he’s trying to explain to me.

“There’s no point sitting here, using words that mean nothing. Go and experiment. It’s time you got out of here. Go and re-conquer your kingdom, which has grown corrupted by routine. Stop repeating the same lesson, because you won’t learn anything new that way.”

“It’s not routine that’s the problem. I’m simply not happy.”

“That’s what I mean by routine. You think that you exist because you’re unhappy. Other people exist merely as a function of their problems and spend all their time talking compulsively about their children, their wives and husbands, school, work, friends. They never stop to think: I’m here. I am the result of everything that happened and will happen, but I’m here. If I did something wrong, I can put it right or at least ask forgiveness. If I did something right, that leaves me happier and more connected with the now.”

J. takes a deep breath, then concludes.

“You’re not here anymore. You’ve got to leave in order to return to the present.”

IT WAS AS I HAD FEARED. For a while now, he has been dropping hints that it was time I set off on the third sacred road. My life has changed a lot since the far-off year of 1986, when my pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela brought me face-to-face with my destiny, or “God’s plan.” Three years later, I followed the so-called Road to Rome, in the area where we were now; it was a painful, tedious process lasting seventy days, and which involved me enacting, each morning, all the absurd things I had dreamed about the night before. (I remember standing at a bus stop for four whole hours, during which nothing of any importance happened.)

Since then, I have done everything that my work demanded of me. After all, it was my choice and my blessing. I started traveling like a mad thing. The great lessons I learned had been precisely those that my journeys had taught me.

Well, the truth is, I’ve always traveled like a mad thing, ever since I was young. Recently, though, I seem to be spending my life in airports and hotels, and any sense of adventure has rapidly given way to profound tedium. When I complained that I never stayed in one place for very long, people were horrified: “But it’s great to travel. I wish I had the money to do what you’re doing!”

Travel is never a matter of money but of courage. I spent a large part of my youth traveling the world as a hippie, and what money did I have then? None. I barely had enough to pay for my fare, but I still consider those to have been the best years of my youth: eating badly, sleeping in train stations, unable to communicate because I didn’t know the language, being forced to depend on others just for somewhere to spend the night.

After weeks on the road, listening to a language you don’t understand, using a currency whose value you don’t comprehend, walking down streets you’ve never walked down before, you discover that your old “I,” along with everything you ever learned, is absolutely no use at all in the face of those new challenges, and you begin to realize that buried deep in your unconscious mind there is someone much more interesting and adventurous and more open to the world and to new experiences.

Then there comes a day when you say: “Enough!”

“Enough!” I say. “Traveling, for me, has become just a monotonous routine.”

“No, it’s not enough, it never will be,” says J. “Our life is a constant journey, from birth to death. The landscape changes, the people change, our needs change, but the train keeps moving. Life is the train, not the station. And what you’re doing now isn’t traveling, it’s just changing countries, which is completely different.”

I shake my head. “It won’t help. If I need to put right a mistake in another life and I’m deeply aware of that mistake, I can do that here. In that prison cell, I was just obeying the orders of someone who seemed to know God’s will: you. Besides, I’ve already asked forgiveness of at least four people.”

“But you’ve never found the nature of the curse placed on you.”