One of my favorite quotes is from Alice in Wonderland:
Alice laughed. ‘There’s no use trying,’ she said: ‘one can’t believe impossible things.’
‘I daresay you haven’t had much practice,’ said the queen. ‘When I was your age, I always did it for half-an-hour a day. Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.’
If you are to find your Personal Legend, or purpose, you may need to do some things that seem impossible.
Think back to the things you have learned and are now easy to you — riding a bicycle or driving a stick shift. When I learned to drive a stick, I needed all my concentration to remember when to shift, how to accelerate without stalling and how to accelerate from a stop on a hill with the car behind me only inches away. I could not play the radio. I could not talk to passengers. It seemed impossible to me. Yet, it somehow became second nature. However, I could see that other people could drive cars with standard transmissions so i knew it could be done. Actually that is a great metaphysical principle: If someone has achieved what I desire, then I know it is possible for me to achieve it too.
But there are things that at one time everyone in our culture believed could not be done. Think about the vision of the Wright brothers! They imagined that humans could fly and it had never been done before. Yet, today we get on planes, trusting that they will be flown safely to our destination. What was once impossible, first became possible, then became fact.
In the book, The Alchemist, many people told the Boy that it was impossible to get to the pyramids. Yet, despite much discouragement, such as having all his money stolen not once but a couple of times, the Boy was able to fulfill his Personal Legend. Something was compelling him to follow the omens he saw.
I would say that he was following his intuition. What compelled him was his Calling or the Universe moving through him as his personal adventure story.
There is so much we can learn from the Boy. He did not give up. He kept remembering the words of both the gypsy woman and the king of Salem whose name was Melchizedek. By the way, author Paulo Coelho chose the king’s name purposefully. In Hebrews, Abram gave Melchizedek a tenth of everything then the king blessed him. In The Alchemist, the king of Salem gave the Boy advice and the meaning of his dream, and the Boy gave him a tenth of his flock.Giving this much away seems impossible if the Boy was going to get to Egypt from Spain, but he did the impossible and the story ends in his favor.
What do you think about the practice of tithing? That is giving a tenth to the source of your spiritual good. It has worked for me for years.
