I felt the boy’s resistance lessening, but his persistent look, and the sadness and resignation on his face, made me go on. ‘All this leads to unhappiness. The path to joy and spiritual fulfilment requires the courage to change and grow. We should always be ready to abandon the comfort of our position and face our problems again and again, until we’re satisfied we’ve resolved them and can go through that door and make progress.’
‘And what do I do to find the right key?’ he went on, giving me no time to enjoy my neat analogy of the door, which he was clearly not ready to appreciate.
At that moment I had to lift my foot off the accelerator for a second as I’d caught up with a lorry full of livestock. When I looked at the petrol gauge, I was gripped by the sudden fear that we wouldn’t have enough to get us to the next service station, which was miles away. I had to slow down in spite of myself so we would use less. Unfortunately my car wasn’t fitted with one of those modern systems that shows you how many miles you can cover with the petrol you’ve got left. I reassured myself by thinking that the lorry would carry on behind me and could help if necessary, and so I greeted the driver with a broad smile as I overtook him, which he responded to with a friendly toot on his horn. Even today, seeing another human being in Patagonia is something to celebrate, which is why this friendly greeting has become a nice little custom.
‘How do I find the right key?’ insisted the boy, oblivious to my musings – and not giving up on the question now that he’d asked it.
‘Just like that!’ I replied, trying to hide the slight annoyance I was beginning to feel at the long journey. ‘What I mean is, if you keep on asking your question over and over again, you’ll always end up finding the answer. If you persevere and try all the keys you’ve got, eventually you’ll open the door.’
And I thought, ‘If you keep on with your questions for a few days, you’ll end up driving me completely mad!’ – which a voice inside me quietly corrected to ‘completely sane’.
Chapter Four
Now that I’d encouraged him to keep asking things, nothing was going to stop the boy doing exactly that till the cows came home. But given that it was a long and dull journey, I decided that this strange conversation might become a pleasant distraction if, instead of thinking of the questions like an exam, I turned them into a sort of mind game. And, oddly enough, this change of perspective made my tiredness vanish as if by magic, and I found I was alert and ready to give my imagination free rein.
‘You said that the key isn’t enough on its own,’ he continued, getting comfortable in his seat, ‘that you also have to find the right way of using it. How do I find out what that way is?’
‘Yes, that’s right,’ I began, with renewed energy, gesticulating as I spoke. ‘The best way to solve a problem is not to think of it as a problem but just as a difficulty or a challenge. Technically, the obstacle is the same, but you’ll be able to approach it with a positive attitude that sharpens the mind and beats a path towards more solutions in the future. You should be thankful to Providence that you come across the odd difficulty.’
‘Be thankful for difficulties?’ he asked in disbelief.
‘Yes, because that will allow you to grow and to keep moving up the path to perfection. Like a wind that strengthens the roots of a tree so that the trunk is supported better. If you think of the obstacles you come across in this positive way, you’ll waste less time complaining and lead a fuller life.’
When I saw that the boy was listening to me intently, I went straight on. ‘Another thing you can do, once you’ve identified the difficulty, is look at it carefully, observe it from different angles, or even break it down into smaller difficulties.’
The boy nodded thoughtfully and said, ‘I had to overcome an important difficulty by breaking it down into smaller ones.’
‘What was that?’ I asked with obvious curiosity.
‘It would have been impossible for me to reach the Earth on my first attempt…’ I made an effort to hide my astonishment and let him carry on. ‘So I had to divide the journey up and make seven stops on other asteroids.’
I decided that, even though he seemed to have lost his marbles, my companion had an extraordinary imagination.
After a silence in which he seemed lost in thought, he added, ‘On one journey I met someone who had a problem that couldn’t be solved.’
‘Oh, really?’ I said distractedly.
‘It was a man who drank to forget.’
‘To forget what?’ I asked lazily.
‘That he was full of shame and guilt.’
‘Why?’ I wanted to know.
‘Because he drank,’ the boy replied, coming full circle with this story that was confusing him so much.
‘Feelings of guilt,’ I remarked, ‘paralyse us and keep us from solving a lot of problems. Taking responsibility makes those feelings disappear and allows us to do more positive things, such as making up as far as possible for the harm we’ve done. Or simply moving on and not falling back into the behaviour that made us feel guilty in the first place.’
‘But if you’ve done something bad,’ he queried, ‘how can you avoid guilt?’
‘Guilt didn’t help that man who was driven to drink. It’s a useless punishment that will rob him of his energy and that he’s persevering with because he’s stopped loving himself. Didn’t you ask him why he’d started drinking in the first place?’
‘No…’ answered the boy, hesitating, and I afforded at least a little smile, as it felt like it would have been harder to find an unknown pharaoh’s tomb than ask a question the boy hadn’t yet asked himself.
‘Loneliness, lack of love, some frustration or other…I don’t know the original reason, but without a doubt being addicted to drink was nothing more than a consequence. Right there, you have a poignant example of the destructive effects you get from not overcoming difficulties.’
‘How naive I was to judge him as I did!’ the boy decided wretchedly. ‘Perhaps my affection would have been the key to open the door that he couldn’t walk through.’
‘Our lives would be a lot better,’ I added, ‘if we stopped judging ourselves and others – if, rather than complaining about all kinds of disadvantages and torturing ourselves with questions of whether or not we deserved our difficulties, or if we could have avoided them, we applied our abilities instead to solving those problems and accepting what we can’t change. As an old oriental proverb says: better to light a match than to keep cursing the darkness.’
The boy was listening to me with interest, so I decided to keep thinking aloud.
‘Sometimes you’ll discover that, when you change your point of view, the obstacle disappears because often the only difficulty is in us – and it’s nothing but our rigid, short-sighted way of seeing things.’
‘The difficulty is in us?’ he repeated incredulously, as he looked down towards his belly button.
‘Most of the time, yes,’ I replied. ‘But the solution is too. The world of ideas and emotions drags the material world after it. However you imagine things to be, that’s probably how they’ll go for you. Up to a certain point, you create the reality around you, as though you were a little god over your surroundings.’
‘How is that possible? Is reality on this planet not one and the same for all men?’ asked the boy, surprised.
‘Perhaps the total reality itself is one and the same,’ I mused, ‘but we can only perceive as much of it as our consciousness has evolved to perceive, according to the strength of our senses. When we sift out of that total reality a few ideas, facts and people that we agree or disagree with, in truth all we’re doing is reflecting our own image.’
‘Do you mean that people never actually come face-to-face with reality, but only with themselves reflected through that reality?’
‘That becomes pretty obvious when you look at just how limited our senses are, and that’s proved by machines that can capture sound waves at frequencies so high or so low that our ears can’t pick
them up, or microscopes and telescopes that multiply our field of vision. But we don’t always understand as clearly that observing our own environment and the things that happen to us is one of the best ways of getting to know ourselves, because everything in the outside world that affects us demonstrates that we aren’t in harmony with the corresponding principle inside us.’
‘Why do you say things in such a complicated way?’ he complained.
‘It’s as though a person’s miserliness could only bother someone else who was a miser, because a generous person would consider it a simple fact, without letting it affect them too much,’ I proposed, seeing that my travelling companion was starting to understand. ‘In the same way, everyone who fights with their bad neighbours or relatives – or against the injustices inflicted on them by their bosses, against society or any number of other things – whether or not they’re right, are in fact fighting with themselves,’ I concluded, rounding off my idea.
‘Who could win a fencing match against a mirror?’ asked the boy, amazed.
‘The problem with those people is they don’t understand that anything that’s in conflict with its environment is doomed to failure,’ I said. ‘Most human suffering comes from resistance to the circumstances that surround us, and from friction between human beings and the laws of nature. The wise man is in harmony with everything that exists. He contemplates reality and realizes that everything that exists, whether he likes it or not, is how it ought to be. He also knows that before we improve anything in the world, there is a lot we need to improve in ourselves.’
‘Is everything that exists good simply because it exists? Why do you always make things so complicated? Please give me an example I can understand,’ implored my young companion.
‘When you push hard against a wall,’ I began, ‘you can feel the wall resisting with the same force. If you push harder, the wall will resist harder, too. The solution lies in taking your hands off the wall: the resistance will disappear by itself. The person who recognizes the wall’s right to exist doesn’t need to push it any more, and isn’t affected by its existence either.’
‘That’s all very well,’ he conceded, ‘but if it’s true that we only know part of reality, then each person lives in his own world, and there are as many worlds as there are people.’
‘Maybe it would be easier for you to imagine it as the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle that, all together, make up a greater reality than any of them does on its own. The most amazing thing is that each person is capable of changing and transforming the world as far as their own perceptions go, without fighting and without the intervention of external forces –’
‘I understand what you mean now,’ he interrupted. ‘If I see a face I don’t like in the mirror, the only thing I can do is smile.’
‘Exactly,’ I agreed. ‘And in the same way, if you have an aggressive neighbour, try to be kinder yourself. If you want a good son, start by being a good father, or vice versa. And the same goes for husbands, wives, bosses, employees…Really, there’s only one way of changing the world, and that’s by changing yourself.’
Chapter Five
We were both quiet for a while then, contemplating the immensity of the Patagonian landscape. An incessant wind blew across that barren wasteland with barely a moment of respite, biting at the sawn-off cones of the mountains. In the distance, on a hillside dotted with vegetation, red streaks of firebush marked the path into the valley.
‘Perhaps this whole universe was created in the image and likeness of a supreme being who wanted to know himself, to experience himself.’
The thought didn’t seem to surprise the boy, who immediately asked, ‘If that were true, what should people on this planet do? Are they free? Or are they tied to the road, like you?’
‘The way I see it,’ I replied, ‘to live is to learn. The more our consciousnesses develop, the more easily we can distil the inherent meaning out of the things that happen to us. Sometimes the pains and illnesses we reject are the ones that could bring us the greatest spiritual riches. That’s why, whatever cards you’re dealt, you should be grateful for a life that gives you the opportunity to evolve. Fate always finds a way to make us learn the things we resist the most, the things we least want to accept.’
‘What is fate? It sounds like a strict master…’ the boy reflected.
‘It’s the path each person follows.’
‘Is it possible to change it?’ he asked with growing confusion.
‘Yes,’ I replied laconically, thinking of all the libraries of the world, overflowing with tomes in which people have tried to find a definitive answer to that question.
As the boy was still giving me a perplexed look, I decided to resort to an image. ‘Imagine yourself as a river that has to flow for ever. You decide to dodge the mountains and try to find the easiest path to the sea. Difficulties,’ I continued, ‘are like the rocks you’ll find on the way. If you drag them with you, they’ll end up forming a dam that will slow you down. But if you overcome them one by one as they appear, your current will be constant and your waters clear, as though the contact with each stone increases your brilliance. At some point you might feel guilty and unworthy of that transparency, and then you’ll look for a way to muddy your waters. Perhaps you’ll become lazy and stray on to level ground, until you come to a stop on some plain. Or you might become rash and tumble down a steep slope, and form a waterfall; or you might wander into winding gullies and become lost. Perhaps your soul will harden like ice, or your cool caress might be burned up in the mirages of the desert…’
‘If I were a river, I wouldn’t like to freeze or burn up in the desert,’ he admitted.
‘In that case, develop purity and you will be transparent; imagine yourself as generous and you’ll fertilize your surroundings; rejuvenate yourself and your coolness will quench the thirst of the places you pass. Trust in your ideals and you will inspire others; become aware of your being and you will awaken those who live in their sleep. Live with purpose and you will fulfil your destiny.’
I stopped talking. Our gazes drifted out over those wild plains, climbing slowly towards the bluish ghosts of the mountains.
Chapter Six
The boy seemed delighted with the image of the river and was absorbed in his thoughts for a while.
I soon realized that for some hours now I’d been driving with a stranger at my side (a friendly stranger, perhaps, but a stranger all the same), not knowing the slightest thing about him. Although I wanted to get to know this singular young man, my intuition told me that revelations would arrive by themselves, and all the quicker if I didn’t try to force them. Sometimes people are like oysters: the only thing we need to do is wait for them to release the pearl that they’ve been harbouring inside.
But not even a master in the esoteric art of the unpredictable could have anticipated the next question. ‘What about sheep, do they have problems, too?’
‘What’s that?’
‘Do sheep have problems, too?’ the boy repeated patiently, as though I were one of those people who need to be told things twice to understand them.
I thanked God that we were short on petrol and had had to slow down, because a question like that could have thrown us off the road. A single look at him was enough to know that he was perfectly serious. I was disconcerted, and answered frankly. ‘In all honesty, I don’t know. I suppose you’d have to be a sheep to be sure, don’t you think?’
To my surprise, the boy nodded and seemed quite satisfied, if not by the logic of my question then at least to be spending his time with an adult capable of acknowledging his own ignorance. Then he added, ‘So what you’re saying is that to know the problems of a flower you’d have to be a flower. Is that it?’
But I wasn’t prepared to spend the whole afternoon on the defensive, waiting for the next surprise from my opponent. It was a perfect opportunity to launch a sharp counter-attack.
‘That’s where you’re wrong, my friend,’ I parried, preparing my f
irst move. ‘You don’t have to be a flower to know that a flower has problems: they’re too beautiful and defenceless. Some of them have thorns to protect them from people who are lured by their beauty and want to cut them from the plant and put them in a vase.’
He looked at me, horrified. I thought he was going to faint, but he composed himself and managed to say, ‘And do the thorns keep them safe?’
His face seemed to beg for an affirmative answer, but, puffed up by my tyrannical over-statement of the truth, I pressed on regardless. This was nothing more than a game, after all.
‘No,’ I replied. ‘The thorns don’t keep them safe. That’s their problem.’
The expression on his face told me that, for my eccentric companion, this was no game. Later, I would discover with much sadness that it was a question of life and death concerning a very close friend of his.
Sometimes, without realizing it, we adults play with children’s deepest feelings, and destroy things much more valuable than anything they can break by themselves.
It would have been useless to point out to him that flowers have survived for thousands of years with that problem, and even that their nature is capable of withstanding it. That wasn’t what worried the boy. What he wanted was to save one particular, unique flower; and when a flower is unique, there is no statistic or botanical book in the world that will bring comfort.
As if he were thinking aloud, he added, ‘Perhaps if they gave up their beauty, if they hid themselves away, they wouldn’t have problems…but then they wouldn’t be flowers either. They need our admiration to be happy. Vanity, that’s their problem,’ he concluded.
At that moment the sad expression I’d seen before, briefly kept away by curiosity, returned to his eyes.
‘Well, anyway, I don’t care about the problems of sheep and flowers.’ Only later would I understand what he was referring to. ‘I’m looking for someone I haven’t seen in a while. He’s a bit like you, but his machine flies.’
The Return of the Young Prince Page 2