Free Like the Flowing River: Thoughts and Reflections by Paulo Coelho

Before us lies a crossroads, clearly marked by posts.
    I try to brake, because I know that the other car won’t be able to overtake – the posts at the crossroads make that impossible. All this takes a fraction of a second. I remember thinking, ‘The guy must be mad!’, but I don’t have time to say anything. The driver of the other car (the image engraved on my memory is that of a Mercedes, but I can’t be sure), sees the posts, accelerates, pulls over in front of me, and when he tries to correct his position, ends up slewed across the road.
    From then on, everything seems to happen in slowmotion. His car turns over on its side once, twice, three times. It hits the hard shoulder and continues rolling over and over, forward this time, with the front and back bumpers hitting the ground.
    My headlights illuminate the whole thing, but I can’t brake suddenly – I’m driving right alongside this car performing somersaults. It’s like a scene from the film I’ve just seen; but that was fiction, and this is real life!
    The car returns to the road and finally stops, lying on its left side. I can see the driver’s shirt. I stop beside him with just one thought in my head: I must get out and help him. At that moment, I feel my wife’s nails digging into my arm: she is begging me, please, to drive on and park further off; the other car might explode, catch fire.
    I drive on for another hundred metres and park. The CD continues playing the Brazilian music as if nothing hadhappened. Everything seems so surreal, so distant. My wife and Isabel, the maid, run towards the scene of the accident. Another car, coming in the opposite direction, stops. A woman jumps out, looking very upset. Her headlights, too, have lit up that Dantesque scene. She asks if I’ve got a mobile phone. I do. Then why don’t I phone for an ambulance!
    What is the emergency number? She looks at me – everyone knows that! 51 51 51! My mobile phone is switched off – at the cinema, they always remind patrons to do that. I key in the access code and we phone the emergency number – 51 51 51. I know exactly where it all happened: between the villages of Laloubère and Horgues.
    My wife and the maid return: the boy in the car has a few scratches, but apparently nothing very grave. Nothing very grave, after what I saw, after turning over six times! He staggers slightly when he gets out of the car; other motorists stop; the firemen are on the scene within five minutes; everything is all right.
    Everything is all right. But he had been a fraction of a second away from hitting our car and hurling us into the ditch; things, then, would have been very bad for all of us. Very bad indeed.
    When I get home, I look up at the stars. Sometimes we encounter things on our path, but because our time has not yet come, they brush past us, without touching us, even though they were close enough for us to see them. I thank God for the awareness to understand, as a friend of mine says, that everything that had to happen happened, but nothing did.

The Moment of Dawn
    D uring the World Economic Forum at Davos, the winner of the Nobel Prize for Peace, Shimon Peres, told the following story.
    A Rabbi gathered together his students and asked them:
    ‘How do we know the exact moment when night ends and day begins?’
    ‘When it’s light enough to tell a sheep from a dog,’ said one boy.
    Another student said: ‘No, when it’s light enough to tell an olive tree from a fig tree.’
    ‘No, that’s not a good definition either.’
    ‘Well, what’s the right answer?’ asked the boys.
    And the Rabbi said:
    ‘When a stranger approaches, and we think he is our brother, and all conflicts disappear, that is the moment when night ends and day begins.’

A January Day in 2005
    I t’s raining hard today, and the temperature is about 3°C. I decide to go for a walk – I don’t feel that I work properly if I don’t walk every day – but it’s very windy too, and so, after about