"The Alchemist" and What is my Personal Legend?

I recently finished The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho. I really liked it, except for a few things.

First of all, everyone’s male except for Fatima. And even then, all she gets to do is sit around while Santiago goes treasure hunting. No, thank you. I have a word for that and that word is pointless.

Now that that’s out of the way, I think that the idea of a Personal Legend is a great one. Because how often do you see people fulfilling their dreams that they had when they were younger? It usually doesn’t happen because they get caught up in life and whatever and never get around to it. Which is rather unfortunate.

It also is an idea similar to subjectivism, which is the philosophical idea that the meaning in your life is what you want it to be. So if you want it to be counting all of the blades of grass in your backyard, it can be that. Or in Santiago’s case, it’s finding the treasure. Or for Fatima it’s waiting for Santiago. (grumble grumble)

But this makes me wonder just what my own Personal Legend is. There isn’t anything that I really really want to do; could a Personal Legend be something more ordinary? All I’ve ever really wanted was to read a lot, and be happy. Maybe that’s my Personal Legend. To be honest, if you told me that there was treasure buried somewhere, I probably wouldn’t care. This is the stuff stories are made of, kids.

Or maybe I have yet to find it, I am pretty young, maybe it’ll drop out of the sky and hit me one day that I’ve always wanted to be an underwater basket weaver. I don’t know.

I completely forgot about the rest of the story, so yeah, Santiago goes off on this quest for treasure, and runs into a girl, and does a bunch of other crazy stuff. It isn’t the story so much that’s important, it’s really the way that Santiago deals with his obstacles and the nuggets of wisdom within the story that make it pretty interesting. Coelho did say that this was basically what he learned from life, so it does have some nice quotes and stuff.

So that’s The Alchemist. Maybe comment with your own Personal Legend, if you know what it is? If you want? It may help me identify mine.