Choosing your path

Paulo Coelho, Brida:

“Choosing a path meant having to miss out on others. She had a whole life to live and she was always thinking that, in future, she might regret the choices she made now.

‘I’m afraid of committing myself,’ she thought to herself. She wanted to follow all possible paths and so ended up following none.

Even in the most important area of her life, love, she had failed to commit herself. After her first romantic disappointment, she had never again given herself entirely. She feared pain, loss and separation. These things were inevitable on the path to love, and the only way of avoiding them was by deciding not to take that path at all. In order not to suffer, you had to renounce love. It was like putting out your eyes in order not to see the bad things in life.

‘Life is so complicated.’

You had to take risks, follow some paths and abandon others. She remembered Wicca telling her about people who followed certain paths only to prove that they weren’t the right ones, but that wasn’t as bad as choosing a path and then spending the rest of your life wondering if you’d made the right choice. No one could make a choice without feeling afraid.

That was the law of life. That was the Dark Night, and no one could escape the Dark Night, even if they never made a decision, even if they lacked the courage to change anything, because that in itself was a decision, a change, except without the benefit of the Dark Night.”