The Heart Suffers

The Alchemist
(Paulo Coelho)

During one of these conversation, the driver told of his own life.

"I used to live near El Cairum, " he said. "I had my orchard, my children and a life that would change not at all until I died. One year, when the crop was the best ever, we went to Mecca, and I satisfied the only unmet obligation of my life. I could die happily and that made me felt good.
"One day, the earth began to tremble, and the Nile overflowed its bank. I was something that I thought could only happen to others, never to me. My neighbors feared that they would lose all their olive trees in the flood, and my wife was afraid that we would lose our children. I thought that everything I owned would be destroyed.
"The land was ruined and I had to find some other way to earn a living. So now I'm a camel driver. But that disaster taught me to understand the word of Allah: people need not fear the unknown if they are capable of achieving what they need and want.
"We are afraid of losing what we have, whether it's our lives or our possessions and property. But this fear evaporates when we understand that our life stories and the history of the world were written by the same hand."

..one afternoon, his heart told him that it was happy. "Even though I complain sometimes," it said, "it's because I'm the heart of a person and people's heart are that way. People are afraid to pursue their most important dreams, because they feel that they don't deserve them, or that they'll be unable to achieve them. We, their hearts, become fearful just thinking of loved ones who go away forever, or of moments that could have been good but weren't, or of treasure that might been found but were forever hidden in the sands. Because when these things happen, we suffer terribly."

"My heart is afraid that it will have to suffer," the boy told the alchemist one night as they looked up at the moonless night.
"Tell your heart that the fear of suffering is worse that the suffering itself. And that no heart had ever suffered when it goes in search of its dreams, because every second of that search is a second's encounter with God and with eternity."

"Every second of the search is an encounter with God," the boy told his heart. "When I have been truly searching for my treasure, every day had been luminous, because I've known that every hour was a part of the dream that I would find it. When I have been truly searching for my treasure, I've discovered things along the way that I never would have seen had I not had the courage to try things that seemed impossible for a shepherd to achieve."

..." Everyone on earth has a treasure that awaits him," his heart said. "We, people's heart, seldom say much about those treasures, because people no longer want to go in search of them. We speak of them only to children. Later, we simply let life proceed, in its own direction, towards its own fate. But, unfortunately, very few follow the path laid out for them - the path to their destinies, and to happiness. Most people see the world as a threatening place, and, because they do, the world turns out, indeed, to be a threatening place.
"So, we, their hearts, speak more and more softly. We never stop speaking out, but we begin to hope that our words won't be heard: we don't want people to suffer because they don't follow their hearts."

"Why don't people's hearts tell them to continue to follow their dreams?" the boy asked the alchemist.

"Because that's what makes a heart suffer most, and hearts don't like to suffer."