I had many hours to kill at airports waiting for connecting flights. Picked up this book - Veronika Decides to Die - by Paulo Coelho (have become a big fan after reading The Alchemist).  This book is essentially about a woman who decides to take her life - she seems to have everything - young and pretty, lots of guys, loving family, steady job - yet something's missing.  She is not depressed nor angry, merely apathetic and feels life has nothing left to offer her.  At the last moment she thinks this thought - 'nothing in this world happens by chance' - and begins to live again - with first thoughts - why this line at precisely the moment she had begun to die - what was the hidden message.

An excerpt from a review : when Veronika decides to commit suicide it is not from profound depression but from boredom and emptiness. When she wakes up from her overdose she finds herself in an old fashioned literary "asylum" where the treatments are--to say the least--unorthodox. There she learns that she has damaged her heart and will in fact die in little more than a week. And from there, the parable unfolds.

Faced with the real possibility of death, Veronika begins to appreciate life. The author develops his theme artfully. Follow your vision, he says, live in the moment, make the most of your fleeting time. Do not waste your life trying to meet the expectations of others, but do what you have always dreamed of doing. 

The strength and tragedy of Veronika's fictional story was instrumental in passing new government regulations in Brazil that have made it more difficult to have a person involuntarily committed. Like any great storyteller, Coelho has used the realm of fiction to magically infiltrate and alter the realm of reality.

Coelho states, ’’An awareness of death encourages us to live more intensely.’’ In her last few days she indulges in all that she had deprived herself of, like playing the piano, her desires, openly displaying hurt, anger, love and frustrations that she kept bottled inside for her 24 years. Veronika now sheds her inhibitions, negativities, complexes, and feels a by now futile wish to live again.  

Its an unusual book - touching, often amusing and thought provoking.  It asks some interesting questions about the true nature of ‘madness’. It questions who is ill and who is normal in our society, and who is fit to be the judge of either?   "Don't you know what it means to be mad", Veronika asks in the book.  "Anyone who lives in their own world is mad .....on the other hand .... you have Einstein,  mad - because he said there was no time or space - just a combination of the two.  Or Columbus, insisting that on the other side of the world lay not an abyss but a continent. Or Edmund Hillary, convinced that a man could reach the top of Mount Everest.  Or the Beatles, who created an entirely different sort of music and dressed like people from another time.  Those people - and thousands of others - all lived in their own world"

And leaves you with the thought - what if you were faced with the prospect of death just as you started valuing life?

I came upon this poem a while ago and thought i'd share it here.

So what is a Cage? - by Rebecca Belliveau

It is secure.
It is a barrier.
It is a home.
It is a life.
It is a death.
It is a body.
It is an existence.
It is sleep.

It is someone else's reality invading your own.

If I force my world upon yours, I will blind you.
When you make me live in your truth, you deny my own.
I am an artist because I want to create my reality.
I have always lived in others', and wondered who was right.
I joined a group of people who denied the reality imposed to search for their own.
But there was nothing when they looked inside, so began the need to create - to destroy - to create again.
I keep searching for someone to tell me I am not insane to need my own reality, to be honest with myself.
I so need another to validate my sanity.
When something is wrong, you know it. Deep inside, even if everyone around you tells you it is not, you still know the truth.
To live in someone else's world means to deny yourself this truth simply to survive.
These are the reasons I create.