…Not everyone has the courage to confront their own dream.
Why?
There are four obstacles. First: they are told from childhood onwards that everything they want to do is impossible. They grow up with this idea, and as the years accumulate, so too do the layers of prejudice, fear and guilt. There comes a time when their Personal Legend is so deeply buried in their soul as to be invisible. But it’s still there.
If they have the courage to disinter their dream, they are then faced by the second obstacle: love. They know what they want to do, but are afraid of hurting those around them by abandoning everything in order to pursue their dream. They do not realize that love is just a further impetus, not something that will prevent them going forwards. They do not realize that those who genuinely wish them well want them to be happy and are prepared to accompany them on that journey.
Once they have accepted that love is a stimulus, they come up against the third obstacle: fear of the defeats they will meet on the path. Anyone who fights for their dream, suffers far more when it doesn’t work out, because they cannot fall back on the old excuse: "Oh, well, I didn’t really want it anyway." They do want it and know that they have staked everything on it and that the path of the Personal Legend is no easier than any other path, except that their whole heart is in this journey. Then, the warrior of light must be prepared to have patience in difficult times and to know that the Universe is conspiring in his favour, even though he may not understand how…
… Having disinterred our dream, having used the power of love to nurture it and spent many years living with the scars, we suddenly notice that what we always wanted is there, waiting for us, perhaps the very next day. Then comes the fourth obstacle: the fear of realizing the dream for which we fought all our lives.
Oscar Wilde said: ‘each man kills the thing he loves’. And it’s true. The mere possibility of getting what we want fills the soul of the ordinary person with guilt. We look around at all those who have failed to get what they want and feel that we do not deserve to get what we want either. We forget about all the obstacles we overcame, all the suffering we endured, all the things we had to give up in order to get this far. I have known a lot of people who, when their Personal Legend was within their grasp, went on to commit a series of stupid mistakes and never reached their goal - when it was only a step away…
- Paulo Coelho on The Alchemist
