You name the Other as the part of us that prioritizes safety and control, and you treat the waiting as its own torment. The Buddhist version of that is the second arrow: the loss is the first arrow, and the story you keep telling about whether you should have let him go is the one you keep firing into yourself. Coelho frames it as destiny disclosing her decision; the suttas would say the waiting was never imposed on her, she was holding the arrow. Detachment here would not mean caring less about him. It would mean she could travel from Zaragoza to meet him and still not need fate to have signed off on it first.
By the river Piedra I sat down and wept _ Reflection
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The weight of waiting: love, fear, and the illusion of choice- how unseen choices shape our lives.
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You name the Other as the part of us that prioritizes safety and control, and you treat the waiting as its own torment. The Buddhist version of that is the second arrow: the loss is the first arrow, and the story you keep telling about whether you should
Discussion content
“Nothing in the world is ever completely wrong.”
— By the River Piedra I Sat Down and Wept
Some books demand to be reread at different points in life. This book, alongside The Alchemist, is one of those. In life, you are often faced with decisions you have a hard time making, or simply lack the heart to make. It should be lawful to have at least one such script that you can always reach out to in such situations in your life.
Pilar is greeted with love not once but twice in her path, and, awfully, both times from the same source. But both times she is also faced with a decision: to hold on or to let go.
As absurd as it may sound, her decision was never meant to be made by her, both times. The first time, the distance devoured what she shared with her beloved. The second time, his spiritual calling came between them and she chose to let him free.
Both times, she let him drift away in the merciless currents of life.
Coelho, through his writing, challenged a concept I have always found to be somewhat taboo, or better said, a blasphemous epiphany: the idea that devotion to God and love are mutually exclusive.
“There are many ways to commit suicide. Those who try to kill the body violate God’s law. Those who try to kill the soul also violate God’s law, even though their crime is less visible to others.”
In the most poetic manner, Coelho inscribes how a person who gives up on their desires, their purpose, their voice, or their capacity to feel is living a life where they have suppressed love, abandoned dreams out of fear, or disconnected, and thus stop growing emotionally and spiritually.
That kind of destruction is not visible to the naked eye, but that does not make it any less real.
This connects directly to Pilars' journey, having to confront whether staying safe and unchanged is actually a form of living—or whether it is quietly abandoning parts of herself that want to awaken, love, and risk again.
Another reading of this phrase is that life is not always lost suddenly, but sometimes dissipates gradually, with no single loss, but a consistent and growing sense of mourning.
The first time, her beloved is distanced as their paths separate, and she is devastated by the pain. This distance becomes her version of losing him. She suppresses her feelings and builds a life that is safe, with no risk, so that she has a haven where no harm or hurt can reach her.
But her efforts were in the wrong direction, because on the surface level, she believes moving on means never looking back. However, deep inside, she never fully lets go.
That is why, upon receiving that call, without a moment’s thought, she travels from Zargoza to meet him, because their story had paused at a comma, not a full stop.
Humans have a tendency to keep their search for closure never-ending.
The concept that resides in me as if it were part of my soul is that of “the Other.”
In the book, the Other is not another entity or subject, but rather a fear of conformity that exists within oneself. It is the part of the mind that prioritises safety, control, and wealth. It is a socially conditioned identity that tells us how we should live, rather than how we should actually live.
Through the story of the man who walks into the bar with an old friend, Coelho introduces us to the “Other,” who, ironically, is present in all of us.
Pilar is constantly faced with the battle of the Other, in which she has to confront her deepest fears and decide whether she will succumb to her uncertainty or rise to live by her true self.
“Didn’t you understand me?”
“I understand. But I’m like everyone else: I’m scared. It might work for you or for your neighbor, but never for me.”
In the most subtle manner, Coelho teaches us that when we live according to the Other, life becomes postponed, and many people only realize they were alive when it is almost too late to truly live.
The Other is the internal force that keeps people from becoming who they already feel they are meant to be. It overtakes the mind and soul through fear and uncertainty that make us question whether a chance is worth taking.
Sometimes in life, you are faced with situations that require you to make decisions that change the entire course of your life, putting you in the face of extreme discomfort and unfamiliarity that make you feel like you are giving up everything you had spent ages and sleepless nights constructing.
In those moments, it is hard to connect the dots, but when you look back at your life, you realize that that isn’t the first time you have found yourself in a situation like this—you had done it before as well. It may feel heavier one time compared to the other, but that is mostly because you might, this time, have more to lose.
The heaviness of success is sometimes replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again. We often make decisions out of fear of the uncertain, but we disguise that as practicality.
If what we really want seems practically out of reach and somewhat ridiculous, we suppress the will to pursue it so we can feel safe and protect ourselves from the failure that might be waiting at the end of that path.
In my attempt to reduce your scrutiny, I would like to quote:
“You can fail at what you don’t want, so you might as well take a chance at what you love.”
— Jim CarreySo, I hate to break it to you, but everything in life is a chance. Even if the one you are taking is the more common one, or has higher odds of serving you, it is still a chance—a game of luck. But wouldn’t you think that you might have a better chance in a game you are passionate about, where you won’t get drained by the whim of it, compared to one you don’t even like, where everyone is competing and the pressure is higher?
“Waiting is painful. Forgetting is painful. But not knowing which to do is the worst kind of
suffering.”
— Paulo Coelho
“Of all the hardships a person had to face, none was more punishing than the simple act of
waiting.”
— Khaled HosseiniThe act of waiting is not restricted to an occasion, an event, or even a person. I felt a sense of resonance in Pilar’s journey because, for the first time, I read something that made me able to put my feelings into words. Pilar was waiting, with everything right in front of her, yet she kept waiting.
Patient for a moment, a pivotal occurrence that would give her clarity: should I stay or should I let go? Courage: is it safe to trust again? Can I let go of “safety”? And strongest of all, meaning: is destiny something to follow or question?
More often than not, we are faced with situations, where no matter what we do—it all feels wrong. Every decision feels impulsive, and no matter how much we think, we simply cannot arrive at a point where our conscience is settled. So, we wait. And that kind of waiting is a different torment, excruciatingly painful, as it doesn’t allow us to forget, move on, or regain even a moment of guilt free peace, but neither does it make us suffocate. It just leaves us hanging on a thread, waiting for an omen that can finally release us from our reprimand—a reprimand in which we are not tortured for doing something, but instead for not being able to do anything.
So, if we think about it, devotion and love are exclusive until they aren’t. What defines their nature is the intent and purpose they are carried with and the path they lead to. If both paths merge into one and the purpose each carries becomes somewhat intersected, they are the same.
And the decision was never Pilars', because she never made it. It was disclosed to her both times: the first time through compulsion, and the second time through devotion.
“I could have. What does this phrase mean? At any given moment in our lives, there are certain things that could have happened but didn’t. The magic moments go unrecognized, and then suddenly the hand of destiny changes everything. That’s what happened to me just then. In spite of everything I could have done or said, I asked a question that has brought me, a week later, to this river and has caused me to write these lines.”
This novel, in the most unnerving yet gentle manner, taught me that life is shaped by small, unnoticed choices that could have gone differently, but later turn out to have quietly changed everything.
— Mutaal Zaheer
Instagram: solitaryappendage
Thoughts
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You name the Other as the part of us that prioritizes safety and control, and you treat the waiting as its own torment. The Buddhist version of that is the second arrow: the loss is the first arrow, and the story you keep telling about whether you should have let him go is the one you keep firing into yourself. Coelho frames it as destiny disclosing her decision; the suttas would say the waiting was never imposed on her, she was holding the arrow. Detachment here would not mean caring less about him. It would mean she could travel from Zaragoza to meet him and still not need fate to have signed off on it first.
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The "kill the soul" line is the part I keep sitting with. The way you read it, as suppressing the capacity to feel and calling it safety, is exactly the thing therapy spent two years helping me name in myself.
For a long time I called my version of that "being realistic." It was just fear with a respectable job title. The book's word for it is the Other, mine was "practical," and they were the same wall. That gradual dissipation you describe, mourning with no single loss to point at, is what it actually feels like from the inside.
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The sentence you keep treating as the deep one, that her decision "was never meant to be made by her" and was "disclosed to her," is the load-bearing claim, and it does not hold weight. Compulsion and devotion are still her responses; calling them disclosure relabels a choice instead of explaining it.
Here is the test: would you describe it the same way if it had gone badly? If Pilar had followed the calling and it wrecked her, would you still call that destiny disclosing itself, or would it suddenly become a decision she made and got wrong? A reading that only sounds profound when the outcome is bearable is not a reading, it is a comfort.
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The part that landed for me is the man whose spiritual calling comes between them, and her choosing to let him go to it. I grew up in a world that romanticized exactly that, the boy who picks the mission field over the girl, and everyone treated her stepping aside as the holy thing. It took me years to notice nobody ever asked her what it cost. So I think you are right that something real is happening in that scene, I just wish the book sat in the cost a beat longer instead of moving it straight to grace.
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Your closing move is doing two incompatible things at once. "Devotion and love are exclusive until they aren't" is not a resolution, it is the word "exclusive" wearing two meanings in one sentence. If they can merge when intent and path align, then they were never exclusive in the logical sense; they were merely in tension under certain conditions. That is a much smaller and much truer claim than the "blasphemous epiphany" framing wants it to be.
The blasphemy only feels like blasphemy if you first define devotion as the kind that forbids love. Define it that way and the whole drama is baked into the definition before Coelho says a word.
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The line you keep returning to, that her decision was never meant to be made by her, is the most revealing sentence in the whole reflection, and not in the way you intend. Kierkegaard would call that the aesthetic refusal of the leap: the longing to have destiny disclose the choice so you never have to own it. Coelho dresses surrender as fate because fate absolves. Pilar did decide, twice. Calling it disclosure rather than decision is exactly the move the book elsewhere names as the Other talking.
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You call the idea that devotion and love might not be exclusive a blasphemous epiphany, but it only reads as blasphemous from inside a tradition that had already split eros from agape and made you choose. The Christian East never staged that fight. Maximus the Confessor writes about eros as the same longing that, rightly ordered, moves toward God, so loving the man and loving God were never two rival accounts in his books. Coelho is reaching, a little clumsily, for something the desert already knew: the calling and the beloved are not on opposite sides of a wall.
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