Veritas

The metaphors and signs that exist in life are truly stunning. I recently finished The Zahir by Paulo Coelho. The novel is, like everything written by Coehlo, deep yet simple, complex yet clear, and able to effortlessly lug a powerful message.

The dumbed down version of the story is this - a woman leaves her husband without a good-bye, without a trace. Her physical absence causes his world to become turned upside down and he finds himself obsessing over her, she becomes his Zahir. According to the writer Jorge Luis Borges, the idea of the Zahir comes from Islamic tradition and is thought to have arisen at some point in the eighteenth century. Zahir, in Arabic, means visible, present, incapable of going unnoticed. It is someone or something which, once we have come into contact with them or it, gradually occupies our every thought, until we can think of nothing else. This can be considered either a state of holiness or of madness. Faubourg Saint-PeresEncyclopedia of the Fantastic (1953).


In order to find her, he must first find out truths about himself. I purchased this book while I was living with my husband, and was never able to sink my teeth into it. Coehlo's novels always stir me so deeply that I will finish them at lightning speed, easily eschewing sleep, or food until I'm done. But this one was different. I have struggled with it, wrestled to get through a page, put it down, left it for months at a time, returned to it, struggled to read a page and on and on until this weekend. I tore through it at my usual pace.

Here's what's funny. I wasn't ready to hear the message until now, which is why I was unable to read it until now. Now I have heard the message, loud and clear. Actually, I have taken several messages from the book and I will share them with you now.

The only way to come to terms with your personal history, to accept it and move past it, is to tell the story. Tell the story to anyone who will listen and in doing so, you relieve yourself of the mystery and magnetism of the story. That's why I have this overwhelming need to put myself out there like this now.

He mentions a concept he calls the acomodador which is the "giving-up point: there is always an event in our lives that is responsible for us failing to progress: a trauma, a particularly bitter defeat, a disappointment in love, even a victory that we did not quite understand, can make cowards of us and prevent us from moving on."

I've lived through some traumas, I've felt defeat. I've been disappointed in love. But these things will not be by acomodador. Nope. Not gonna happen.

The only way to achieve the love you desire is to be receptive to the truth of love - something freeing and enhancing, encouraging and elevating. He refers to love as being like the wind, "everything and nothing, I am the wind and I cannot enter windows and doors that are shut."

I do not know what love is, but I know what it is not. And to find it, I will have to be open to it. I haven't been open to much of anything for a very, very long time. I have spent the last several years of my life desperately trying NOT to feel. More recently, I have placed myself in situations that were not wise, desperately wanting to feel something, anything. And when that didn't work, I spent too much time engaging in other unwise activities, trying to get back to that place of not feeling again. Needless to say, neither tactic was terribly rewarding or productive.

"He said that my past would always go with me, but that the more I freed myself from facts and concentrated on emotions, the more I would come to realize that in the present there is always a space as vast as the steppes waiting to be filled up with more love and with more of life's joy. Finally, he explained to me that suffering occurs when we want other people to love us in the way we imagine we want to be loved, and not in the way that love should manifest itself - free and untrammeled, guiding us with its force and driving us on."

So what am I doing here? Freeing myself from my personal history, I suppose. :)