Seattle and Raleigh-Durham marketing, graphic and brand design studio Design Kompany

Wow, I didn’t know the author Paulo Coelho has a blog. Watching him on YouTube, however, takes some of the zing out of the last book of his I read.

It wasn’t long ago that I finally read The Alchemist. A true treasure, it was worth every moment, and every tear. One of those books.

The thing is, I was hanging around for some people to show up at this event, but really all I wanted to do was go home and finish reading The Alchemist. I realized hanging out would have been less interesting, anyway, and so eventually gave up waiting and got my book and took it to this cafe on 12th that I never go to because I just wanted to hide out from everyone, even home, to finish this thing.

That was the same kind of feeling when I was watching The Seventh Samurai, another piece of art I finally got around to experiencing this year. It’s probably because it’s directed by Akira Kurosawa Akira Morita of Design Kompany always gets pulled into side conversations with strangers about this director that I put it off for so long.

Stranger: What’s your name?
Akira: Akira.
Stranger: Ooo! Like Akira Kurosawa, man! That’s coooool.

or the alternative version
Stranger: Like the movie!!?? No waaaay!

In the midst of viewing Seventh Samurai, I had to go interview some political candidates downtown. This was right when that cool martial arts samurai was getting going strutting his stuff. Hard to press pause on that one.

Anyway, if you haven’t read The Alchemist, here is an excerpt to help you get there. Bear in mind there’s a heckuva lot of setup to get you interested in this main character, “the boy,” and to really start to worry for him and hope for him to be okay.

Here it goes:

The boy continues to listen to his heart as they crossed the desert. He came to understand its dodges and tricks, and to accept it as it was. He lost his fear, and forgot about his need to go back to the oasis, because, one afternoon, his heart told him that it was happy.

“Even though I complain sometimes,” it said, “it’s because I’m the heart of a person and people’s hearts are that way. People are afraid to pursue their most important dreams, because they feel they don’t deserve them, or that they’ll be unable to achieve them. We, their hearts, become fearful just thinking of loved ones who go away forever, or of moments that could have been good but weren’t, or of treasures that might have been found but were forever hidden in the sands.

Because, when these things happen, we suffer terribly. —Paulo Coelho, The Alchemist”