During this process of living and experiencing what it means to be human, I once came across the word alchemist through someone I loved.
I became curious about it.
At first, it was simply that — curiosity.
I started reading about alchemy, its history, the symbols behind it, the idea of transforming one substance into another, the philosopher’s stone, and of course, Nicolas Flamel.
I remember thinking that the reference to him as an alchemist wasn’t actually that crazy.
There was history behind it.
Some people really dedicated their lives to understanding transformation, matter, nature and the possibility that something could become something else.
But after reading for a while, another part of alchemy caught my attention.
Spiritual alchemy.
And that made much more sense to me.
Because we experience transformation constantly.
Not necessarily in a mystical way. Simply by being alive.
We go through experiences, and they change us. We meet people, and they change us. We fall in love. We lose people. We leave places. We arrive somewhere new.
We make decisions that change the direction of our lives.
Sometimes we choose those transformations. Sometimes we don’t.
Sometimes we only understand what an experience did to us years later.
That is when I started thinking about the idea of the inner alchemist.
The part of us that is constantly processing everything we experience and turning it into something else. What we live becomes part of the way we think.
The way we love.
The way we react.
The way we create.
The way we see ourselves.
And I don’t think that means every difficult experience has to become a lesson, or that everything happens for a reason.
Sometimes things simply happen.
But we still have a choice in what we do with what remains.
That, to me, is where The Alchemy begins.
Not in becoming a completely different person.
But in being willing to look at what is already inside of us.
To understand it.
To work with it.
To change what no longer belongs to us.
To keep what does.
And to allow ourselves to continue becoming.
The more I thought about it, the more I realized that maybe the figure of the alchemist was never as distant from us as I once imagined.
Maybe we all have one living inside of us.
And maybe being human is already an alchemical experience.