Like the Flowing River by Paulo Coelho

Paulo Coelho always writes interesting books. I love The Alchemist, which was for me, like many others, the first of Coelho's books that I encountered.

This book is a collection of reflections, often less than a page in length. Many of them are very moving. Some are funny. There are quite a lot of "life's like that" ideas, which I suppose in shorter form could grace the pages of the Reader's Digest magazine, although that seems quite flippant when writing about Coelho!

One of my favourite images was that of comparing a pupil to a pencil: 1) the pencil is guided by a hand, as we are by God; 2) sometimes the pencil needs to be sharpened - this brings suffering, but makes the pencil sharper, and better; 3) we can rub out the mistakes a pencil makes - correcting a mistake is a good thing; 4) what matters is not the wood outside but the graphite within; 5) the pencil always leaves a mark - so do we. We should consider what that mark is ...

A Christmas present from Mum, I will probably dip back into this ... I'm sure there are some assembly ideas in there!