I gave Stowe Boyd a ride to Oakland Airport last night after the New Communications Forum.
He asked me what my dreams were.
I said I was in the process of reevaluating everything after the tsunami and to ask me again in a month. The truth is I was already reevaluating everything before the tsunami. The tsunami was the proverbial camel that broke the straw's back (yup, it's reversed on purpose). The big thwack to complacency.
It's very strange flipping through my newly returned journal. The books I reference in the last few pages are now....Where? Perhaps someone else is now reading Finger Pointing to the Moon, The Alchemist, Tuesdays with Morrie, and Real Magic (couldn't finish this one - too many bullet point lists, not enough story).
Only one of those books did I bring on the trip.
All of the others were discovered serendipitiously in Koh Lanta book exchanges and chosen in actuality by my boyfriend in what Paulo Coelho would clearly see as an "omen". (And why should I be stunned to find yet another omen - I see from his site that Coelho is also working on a tsunami aid book project.)
Here's a snippet from my journal, December 22, 2004:
The old man pointed to a baker standing in his shop window at one corner of the plaza. "When he was a child, that man wanted to travel, too. But he decided first to buy this bakery and put some money aside. When he's an old man, he's going to spend a month in Africa. He never realized that people are capable of any time in their lives of doing what they dream of."
"He should have decided to become a shepherd," the boy said.
"Well, he thought about that," the old man said. "But bakers are more important people than shepherds. Bakers have homes, while shepherds sleep out in the open. Parents would rather see their children marry bakers than shepherds."
... The old man continued, "In the long run, what people think about shepherds and bakers becomes more important for them than their own destinies."
- from The Alchemist, by Paulo Coelho, yet another populist author whose work is translated in 56 languages - and it's not a business book
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