Timing

'Everyone on earth has a treasure that awaits him,' his heart said. 'We, people's hearts, 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, they world turns out, indeed, to be a threatening place.'

From The Alchemist, Paulo Coelho



I talked about this a little yesterday, our beliefs manifesting themselves as realities. I remember when I first read this book, The Alchemist, many years ago, I was largely untouched by it. But when I came back to it a few years later, it made far more sense and it spoke to a different part of me that I had not been previously open to. I think sometimes we need to trust that things happen when they are meant to happen. The timing may not make sense till many years later but one day, we will be able to look back on both the good times and the bad and see our experiences cushioned in a greater framework; a larger narrative.

There have been so many times over the past few years when I've thought about my insomnia and asked the questions Why me? Why now? I still don't know the answer to this, but I'm closer than I was to it a year ago. And I hope that another year from now, I will be closer still to understanding why this has been a good time for me to not sleep. It sounds strange, because can there ever be a "good time" to not sleep? Ask me in the middle of a bad patch and I'll most likely say no, but when I emerge from a long, dark tunnel and feel a stronger person, something in me says yes, I needed this. Somehow, I really did.