It’s Never Too Late To Start

At least once every year I read The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho. Usually it’s during a time in my life when I’m craving divine connection to Something Bigger Than Me. (Lately, and throughout the pandemic, it’s all I want to read.)

The Alchemist is the story of Santiago, a shepherd boy, who pursues his Personal Legend across the desert and home again.

The “25th Anniversary Edition” is my favorite, because its Forward begins like this:

“When The Alchemist was first published twenty-five years ago in my native Brazil, no one noticed. A bookseller in the northeast corner of the country told me that only one person purchased a copy the first week of its release. It took another six months for the bookseller to unload a second copy–and that was to the same person who bought the first! And who knows how long it took to sell a third.

By the end of the year, it was clear to everyone that The Alchemist wasn’t working. My original publisher decided to cut me loose and cancelled our contract. They wiped their hands of the project and let me take the book with me. I was forty-one and desperate.”

The Alchemist later became a mega-success. It’s been translated from Portuguese into 80+ languages and it’s spent a record-breaking 400 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list.

But Paulo Coelho’s bleak first-experience as a published writer gives me so much hope for not-yet possibilities in my own life now (particularly as someone who writes things).

One of my favorite authors (one of the most influential authors of my time! an author who’s been interviewed by Oprah!) was “forty-one and desperate” before he published his first book; and it was massively unsuccessful and generally ignored for years before anyone started reading it.

That didn’t stop him from writing it or publishing it (twice).

Paulo Coelho says that’s because the story is HIM: “I never lost faith or wavered in my vision. Why? Because it was me in there, all of me, heart and soul.”

And, because “[t]he story of one person is the story of everyone, and one [wo]man’s quest is the quest of all humanity,” we’re still reading and relating to his words decades later.

I think, too, it’s because he was writing from a place of Inspired Trust In Something Big.

His heart speaks to my heart (speaks to your heart) because we’re inspired by the same Energy That Connects Us.

And that energy never runs out or goes away completely. Even if it takes awhile… Paulo Coelho demonstrates, over and over again, that it’s never too late to get started.

xx, alycia buenger

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