The Zahir ! Another awesome work by Paulo.....this time all about "OBSESSION"... Well i use to think obsession is only when people are after the obvious things like....money...property....fame and so on....but then this book made me realise that ALL of us are obsessed with something without realising it at all.....we have been clinging to those few things that we want most ( or at least we think we want most ) and have naturally shut the rest of the world behind...totally blinded !
And of and on theres something from the other side of the world poking through the curtain we have drawn around us causing tiny holes to appear through which we get to peek...but then we are afraid of what might be on the other side if we were to draw the curtain open...so we hussshhh ourselves and patch that hole up so we stay comfortable in our world of obsession....
Human beings are the most amazing creation of nature for we are capable of loving EVERY one of the zillions of things in the universe at one time....LOVE never runs out...eternally... but then given such awesome gift by nature...yet we downgrade our system to Loving ONLY a few things that we choose...wouldnt Nature be crying for all the effort it had put for something like 14 billion years into creating this magnificent system we live in ! ??
In this book...a renowned author's wife goes missing leaving no trace. The author has absolutely no idea why and begins the search for his wife....and in the process he learns the truth of his own life which leads him to a new understanding of the nature of love, the power of destiny and what it really means to follow your heart...
The word " ZAHIR", explained by the author
as an idea from the islamic tradition which means "Visible", "Present" or "Incapable of going unnoticed" It can refer to a person or an object which gradually takes over our every thought, until we are unable to think of anything else. This could be considered a state of holiness or a state of madness.
So...isnt it true that we find our plants grown faster when we were not looking every morning and evening to see if theres a new leaf on it..? We love the plant...water it ...fertilize it...trim it and add the soil whenever needed...but say we look at every 5 mins to check if its growing...wouldnt it drive us mad by even just a week ?? Now thats obsession..in my own words! Whereas if you....let it grow...and take its time and do all thats necessary ...while also loving everything else around us....one day after a few months when we are watering it...we will be sweetly surprised to see a lovely bloom and we might go " HEy....i just planted it...and it has bloomed !!" so fast ! hahaha...yeah but it wasnt exactly "SO FAST" on the contrary it took all its time while we let it ....so i believe it applies to everything else we do .... just spread our love to everything....and we will get to be surprised every now and then.... but if we stay obsessed over just one plant ...then we most likely would miss every other bloom around us....including the one we are obsessed about !
And here i wish to share some phrases from the book which i really like :
" Welcome to the place where we always say that the sky is blue even when it is grey because we know that the colour is still there above the clouds"
"The world we know today is merely a story someone has told us, but it is not the true story. The other story includes special gifts and powers and the ability to go beyond what we know"
" I dont regret the difficulties i have experienced; i think they have helped me to become the person i am today. I feel the way a warrior must feel after years of training: he doesnt remember the details of everything he learned, but he knows how to strike when the time is right"
"When they passed through cities, the nomads would think: The poor people who live here, for them everything is always the same. The people in the cities probably looked at the nomads and thought : Poor things , they have nowhere to live. The nomads had no past, only the present and that why they were always happy."
" In order to live fully , it is necessary to be in constant movement; only then can each day be different from the last"
Happy Reading :)
