Like the sun, life casts its light in every direction. To kindle a fire, we have to focus the sun’s scattered rays on a single point. But in childhood we want everything at once, and we cannot yet control the immense light and energy that life has given us. Eventually a day comes when we need to concentrate the light within us so that we may ignite an inner fire capable of giving our lives passion and meaning. Yet we do not know what that meaning is. So we look to the sky and ask: What is the meaning of my life?

Many pass quickly over this question and bury the troubling question somewhere within themselves, because if we genuinely try to find an answer, we will not easily be able to lay our heads down at night in peace. Those who forget the question will live tomorrow as they lived yesterday; and when that uninvited guest arrives to release them from their yesterdays and todays, they will complain bitterly: “My life was too short, and I never had the chance to live.”

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Some do not fear the question and set out in search of an answer. But because they do not know the answer, they begin by reading the answers of those who faced this difficult question before them. Eventually they find an answer that, in their judgement, is the right one. Once they arrive at it and the question is gone, they will live the rest of their lives as slaves to the answer they have found. They extract rules from their answer and insist that others must obey them too, because they believe they have discovered the sole reason for their own existence and that of everyone else. They will build temples for those who accept the answer and courts for those who do not.

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And finally there are those who realise that the question itself is a trap, because there is no answer waiting outside them. Instead of searching outwardly, they turn inward and return to their childhood. They remember what once filled them with deep passion and enthusiasm, and regardless of what others say, they devote their lives to that rediscovered inner fire. They know that passion and love are the sacred fire within us, born from concentrating the rays of our inner sun.

Gradually they discover that what they do in life under the guidance of this love is connected to a mysterious source beyond human knowledge. In acknowledgement of that mystery that shapes their destiny, they bow their heads in acceptance and respect, and they do not abandon the journey along the path illuminated by the burning flame in their hearts.

They move forward trusting the inspirations of the heart; and when they cannot see those inspirations clearly, they honestly rely on the logic of an inner order that keeps them steady on their way. Others may think them mad, and indeed sometimes they act like mad people. The truth is that those who have discovered genuine love and will have always appeared mad to others and estranged from the external world.

They have chosen their path because they allowed the mysterious force of that path to choose them. Perhaps they will discover the meaning of their lives only when they stand smiling before that uninvited guest. They are content because their path has been beautiful, rich in awareness and heart.

“A free rendering from Paulo Coelho’s Manuscript Found in Accra”