Wednesday, January 4, 2017

Smell the Holly and Bon Courage


New Year fireworks 2015 London
The aspirations that I have set for myself during the previous year and the twelve months preceding the last twelve months and also the twelve months prior and  earlier  on will  once again make it to the list of  resolutions for 2017.

It has been five years since I started blogging , the year my girls left home for their further studies. I still have not mastered the art of posting as often as some bloggers that I follow.

Often much time is wasted on dilly dallying as I can be indecisive about  many things. I have cut down on commuting unless absolutely necessary as these days traffic is horrendous. I could use the time for reading printed books or articles on line. I have a tendency to read the articles  that are sent to my inbox. Welcome to the era where our  sense of community is not only the place where we live in, it is also on the websites that we visit often.

On the last day of 2016, I finished reading The Return of the Young Prince written by Alejandro.G.Roemmers and translated from Spanish by Oliver Brock. The award winning artist, Pietari Posti  has been specially commissioned for the illustrations that accompany the story. It is a tribute to The Little Prince whose author has good reasons to believe that he hails from the asteroid known as B612, a planet scarcely bigger than a house.


No longer content with his tiny planet, the young prince once again sets off to explore the universe. It is the story of the road trip taken between  the little Prince and the narrator who has found the former as he drives down a lonely road in Patagonia and takes him on a journey. Once again the young prince has questions about humanity just like when he was the Little Prince and asks the narrator incessantly and the latter answers him arduously and patiently.
As Roemmers narrates his story, he includes his thoughts and reflections.

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 thta 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 principles within us.’

‘ Why do you say things in such a complicated way?’  he complained.

Roemmers gets the message across to everyone who reads the book that we must open our eyes, our senses and most importantly our hearts and develop purity. Have trust in our ideals and become aware of our being and live with a purpose.

In the story, the narrator tells the young prince :
“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 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.’

Though the book gets a little preachy and moralistic at some point of the story, it definitely reminds us of the values we should always carry with us as we go through life. The magic for the Little Prince cannot be recreated.Nonetheless The Return of the Young Prince  is charming and  a joyful read. It is a tribute and not a sequel to The  Little Prince, the heartwarming fable by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry.


Once again we are reminded of the famous quote from The Little Prince.
On ne voit bien qu’avec le coeur Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
One  can  see clearly only with the heart.
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