I Have Read The Alchemist Three Times. It Has Never Said the Same Thing Twice.

Published: September 6, 2026 | By Jennifer Mount, Legacy Realty Advisors – Tulsa, OK

The first time I read The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho was 2018. I was in a little apartment that felt like the beginning of everything. My kids had grown up and moved out, and for the first time in my adult life I had space that was just mine. I felt different than I ever had. Lighter. Like the whole world was still in front of me and I finally had room to meet it.

I wrote that in the margin on page 102. “I feel so different than I ever have.”

I read it again in 2020. As I got to that same page and found those words in my own handwriting and I could not breathe for a moment. Because I felt different than I ever had in 2020 too. Completely, devastatingly different. My son Tyler had died. My best friend. My soulmate. The person I had at fourteen years old who shaped every single part of who I became. He was gone, and my whole world had shattered into something I did not recognize and did not know how to live inside of. We were in the middle of Covid. I was navigation helping my daughter heal from the devastation of everything that happened with her brother. The words “I feel so different than I ever have” had never been more true.

The same words. Three inches of margin. Two completely different human beings reading them.

I just finished The Alchemist for the third time. It is September 2026. My daughter just got engaged. My grandson Leon is here and he is everything. I am building something at Legacy Realty Advisors that I am proud of. And sometimes I do not know how to feel, because I have so much gratitude for this life and so much sadness that Tyler does not get to experience it with me. Both of those things are true at the same time. I have stopped trying to resolve that tension and started learning to just hold it.

That is what this book does. It holds it with you.

What The Alchemist Is Actually About

Paulo Coelho's novel follows a young Andalusian shepherd named Santiago who leaves everything familiar to pursue his Personal Legend, which is his term for the unique purpose each person is born to fulfill. Santiago travels from Spain to the markets of Tangier to the Egyptian desert, losing things and finding things and losing them again, guided by omens and by the belief that the universe conspires to help those who pursue what they are meant for.

On the surface it is an adventure story. Underneath it is something much harder and much more honest. It is a book about what it costs to become who you are supposed to be. And it is a book about how the treasure you are searching for is almost never where you thought it was going to be.

I have recommended this book to more people than I can count over the years. Clients going through divorces. Agents who were questioning whether real estate was really their calling. Friends who had lost something they thought was permanent. Young people who were just starting out and could not yet see the shape of what their life was going to become.

The reason I keep recommending it is the same reason I keep reading it. It meets you exactly where you are. And where you are keeps changing.

Life Has Seasons and We Have to Be Willing to Feel Them All

Here is what I want every person reading this to understand, whether you picked this up because you love real estate, because you follow Legacy Realty Advisors, or because something in the title stopped you mid-scroll at a moment when you needed it to.

We all lose things. All the time. Not just people, though the loss of a person is its own category of grief that nothing fully prepares you for. We lose businesses we built with everything we had. We lose marriages we thought would last forever. We lose versions of ourselves we thought were permanent. We lose the futures we had planned so carefully that when they changed it felt like the ground disappeared.

And we have to keep going anyway. Not because the grief is not real, but because pressing forward and honoring what we lost are not opposites. They can exist in the same life. They have to.

Tyler was twenty nine years old when he died. He was the kind of person who would start singing in the middle of a run just because a song came into his head. He would do karaoke anywhere, anytime, completely unselfconsciously, completely himself. One time we met in Marina Del Rey in California and went to a hot yoga class together, and he kept leaving the room because he was too hot, and the instructor finally locked him out. He stood outside that door laughing at himself and at me still inside sweating through the class, and I laughed so hard I could barely breathe. That was Tyler. Fully, unapologetically, hilariously alive.

He would have adored Leon. He would have been the first one on the dance floor at his sister's engagement, doing karaoke until everyone was crying from laughing. He should have been there for all of it.

He was not. And I have had to find a way to carry that while also being fully present for everything that is still here and still beautiful and still worth showing up for.

The Alchemist gave me language for that work long before I knew I was going to need it.

Finding Purpose in the Pain

The Tyler Glenn Beatty Rainbow Relief Fund exists because of Tyler and because of a conviction I could not shake after he died: his life was not finished producing just because he was gone.

The name comes from the belief that there is always a rainbow at the end of the storm. Always. Even when you cannot see it yet. Even when the storm feels like it will never end.

So far the fund has supported Crisis Pregnancy Outreach, which is an organization that helps women facing unplanned pregnancies. I went there myself when I was thirteen years old and pregnant with Tyler. That detail is not lost on me. The son whose loss created the fund was the same person whose beginning sent me through those doors. That is not coincidence. That is the universe writing a story I could not have planned if I tried.

The fund has also provided bedding for fifty children entering the foster care system, because every child going into an uncertain situation deserves to feel held by something warm and their own. And this October we will hold the seventh annual Run to Remember in Tyler's honor, partnering with City Lights to feed Tulsa's homeless community under the Maybell Bridge.

Tyler's life is still producing. That is not a coping mechanism. That is a fact.

Paulo Coelho writes that everything that happens once can never happen again, but everything that happens twice will surely happen a third time. I have read The Alchemist three times now. Each time it has found me in a different storm and shown me a different rainbow. I do not think that is an accident.

What Santiago Taught Me About Stewardship

My word for this year is stewardship.

Not chasing more. Not sprinting toward the next thing before I have fully shown up for what is right in front of me. Stewardship. Being a faithful, intentional, present caretaker of everything God has placed in my hands.

My agents. My clients. My students. My grandson. My daughter. The fund. This business I have spent 25 years building in Tulsa. My friends. My hope for a person to do life with. ALL the things!

At the end of The Alchemist, Santiago discovers that the treasure he traveled the entire world to find was back where he started. The journey was not a detour. The journey was the point. Everything he lost and found and lost again along the way was what made him capable of recognizing the treasure when he finally stood in front of it.

I think about that every time I sit with a Tulsa family who is buying their first home, or a seller who is moving out of a house full of memories, or an investor who is trying to figure out what to do with the equity they have spent twenty years building. Every single one of them is on a journey. Every single one of them has lost something to get here. And every single one of them has a Personal Legend, a purpose they were put here to fulfill, whether they have named it yet or not.

My job is to show up for that. To be present for it. To be a good steward of the trust they place in me when they let me into one of the most significant decisions of their lives.

That is what this third reading of The Alchemist reminded me. The treasure is not somewhere else. It is here. It is now. It is Leon's laugh and my daughter's engagement ring and Tyler's voice in every song that comes on the radio when I am driving alone and missing him.

It is all of it, held together, at the same time.

This Book Is for You If

You are in your 2018 and everything feels possible and you feel like the WHOLE world is ahead of you. Read it now. Let it prepare you without knowing it is preparing you.

You are in your 2020 and the ground has disappeared and you do not know how to take the next step. Read it now. Let Santiago show you that the journey continues even when it breaks your heart.

You are in your 2026 and you are holding gratitude and grief in the same two hands and some days you do not know which one to feel first. Read it now. Let it tell you that both are allowed. That both are real. That you do not have to choose.

And when you finish it, write the date in the margin. Come back to it in two years. See who you have become by then.

Order The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho wherever books are sold. Read it slowly. Read it more than once.

Subscribe to our YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/@JenniferMount

To learn more about the Tyler Glenn Beatty Rainbow Relief Fund or the seventh annual Run to Remember this October, reach out directly through https://lrahomes.com

Ready to talk about your Tulsa real estate journey with someone who will show up for it fully:

3-2-1 Takeaway

3 Things to Remember

• Life has seasons and the same words, the same book, the same house, the same relationship will mean something completely different depending on which season you are standing in when you encounter them

• We all lose things - people, businesses, marriages, versions of ourselves - and pressing forward and honoring what we lost are not opposites. They can and must exist in the same life

• Your Personal Legend, the purpose you were put here to fulfill, is still being written regardless of what you have lost along the way. The treasure is rarely where you thought it was going to be

2 Questions Worth Asking

• What season am I in right now, and am I allowing myself to fully feel it rather than rushing past it toward something that feels safer

• Is there a loss in my life that I have been carrying as dead weight rather than as something that could still produce purpose if I let it

1 Thing to Do Next

Read The Alchemist. Or read it again. Write the date in the margin on the first page. Notice what hits you. Notice what you skip past. Come back to it when your life looks different and see what it says to you then. Call me, lets go for a walk or get coffee and celebrate our current season together.

And if you are navigating a season of change in your Tulsa real estate life, buying, selling, investing, or simply trying to figure out what your next chapter looks like, book a conversation with me:

https://link.cncsdirect.com/widget/booking/2BPftOW1aYttaxdttERz

Jennifer Mount is a licensed REALTOR and Managing Broker with Legacy Realty Advisors, specializing in Midtown Tulsa and surrounding communities. She is also the founder of the Tyler Glenn Beatty Rainbow Relief Fund, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit providing relief to those in the middle of life's storms. To learn more or to get involved, visit https://lrahomes.com. To discuss buying or selling in Tulsa, book directly at https://link.cncsdirect.com/widget/booking/2BPftOW1aYttaxdttERz

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