And maybe do the same for you.
I know firsthand that when you are about to lose hope, something challenges you, catches your attention, shines in the middle of the darkest night, becomes a lighthouse, and guides you back home safe and sound.
It happened to me with a book.
A book that had a green cat on its cover.
That book was called Kafka on the Shore. Its author was an enigmatic Japanese, Haruki Murakami.
That book was like a medicine that cured my cynicism and made me believe again that the universe always conspires in our favor, even if sometimes it seems it does it against us.
That’s why I want to share with you some lessons I have learned by reading Haruki Murakami’s work 🙂
1. The power of signs.
Haruki Murakami had three clear signs that anticipated his success as a writer.
- When he had no money to pay a bank fee, he walked crestfallen with his wife and found the exact amount he owed lying on the ground.
- He went to a baseball game. And at the exact moment when Dave Hilton hit a ball thrown by Satosi Takahashi, he felt a message from the universe fall into his hands in the form of an epiphany: “Maybe I can write a novel.” That thought changed his life completely.
- One day at 11 in the morning, Gunzo literary magazine called him to tell him that his first novel had made it to the finals of their literary contest. After this, he walked, found a pigeon with wounded wings, and helped it. When he held the pigeon in his hands, something in his mind told him, “I will win the prize,” and he did. Since then, Haruki has claimed to care for his literary career like someone caring for a wounded pigeon.
From the signs the universe sent to Haruki Murakami, I learned that,
- The universe always provides you with what you need to fulfill your destiny.
- Following a sign can cause a butterfly effect in your life that completely changes it.
- Signals are the language of the universe and are not understood using logic but with intuition.
2. If it’s not fun, don’t do it
The right path is often fraught with difficulties but also with a sense of well-being.
Haruki Murakami, in his book “Novelist as a Vocation,” speaks of that sense of well-being in the following terms, “If you are engaged in something that seems important to you, but you find no fun or spontaneous joy in it, if your heart does not throb with excitement, likely, you harbor somewhere a wrongness, a certain discord. When feeling something like this, we should go back to the starting point and, from there, eliminate every extra element that hinders enjoyment.”
And he is right.
I have discovered, in my skin, that if what you do doesn’t make you happy, you won’t be able to do it for long, and if you insist, you certainly won’t do it to 100% of your capacity.
And if you don’t give 100% of yourself, you will not be fulfilled as a person and will lead a mediocre life.
Following that feeling of well-being turns you into the river’s water, able to overcome any rock (problem) and reach the sea (your final goal).
3. Believe it or not, you have everything you need.
You say to yourself, “I don’t have enough capital to achieve my dreams,” and settle for it. — Then your dreams die for lack of commitment.
If you don’t have enough capital to do something, you may need to start a couple of rungs down (save money by working as a telemarketer, was my case).
The universe may not give you precisely what you need to materialize your dreams overnight, but it does give you the tools to achieve them little by little.
Murakami says something extraordinary in this regard. “As insignificant as something may seem, the world is littered with rough gemstones as alluring as mysterious. And all that exceptional material is free.”
We always have what we need (those precious stones) to move forward in life right under our noses in the form of opportunities or contacts, but we don’t want to see it, or we are too lazy to start three steps behind where we had planned, and we give up.
But if you are humble, don’t give up, and are willing to start from the bottom, the whole universe will conspire in your favor and will open doors that you thought were closed so you can realize yourself as a person.
A virtual hug
AG
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