The missing brick

Not feeling very well this morning I stayed several hours in, lying on my couch, doing some web-surfing and reading my 2-reasons favourite book. I uploaded some more segments from it in my blog and here is another one that, at the moment, drawn my attention:

“Once, when I and my wife were travelling, I received a fax from my secretary.

‘There’s one glass brick missing for the work on the kitchen renovation’, she said. ‘I’m sending you the original plan as well as the plan the builder has come up with to compensate for it.’

On the one hand, there was the design my wife had made: harmonious lines of bricks with an opening for ventilation. On the other, there was the plan drawn up to resolve the problem of the missing brick: a real jigsaw puzzle in which the glass squares were arranged in a high-gledy-piggledy fashion that defied aesthetics.

‘Just buy another brick,’ wrote my wife. And so they did, and thus stuck to the original design.

That afternoon, I thought for a long time about what had happened; how often, for the lack of one brick, we completely distort the original plan of our lives.”

(Paulo Coelho’s Like the flowing river)