“The Earth is not just another planet! It contains one hundred and eleven kings...seven thousand geographers, nine-hundred thousand businessmen, seven-and-a-half million drunkards, three–hundred–eleven million vain men; in other words, about two billion grown-ups.”
Thank you so much for joining me as a I work my way through Susan Storm's list of "10 Must-Read Books for INFJs." For those of you who may want to read these superb books along with me, HERE is the link:
The first on the list is The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupery. This adorable, heart-warming children's book was first written in French. About as French as I get is when I ask for a croissant, so I appreciate the English translation, available as an E-book at my local library.
According to Susan Storm, INFJ's are drawn to this story because of its symbolic nature. While written as a children's book, its deeply emotional core calls out to the adult INFJ. This book highlights the fragility of life, the significance of relationships, and the critical role imagination plays in our lives.
What follows is not a fully-rounded rendition and review of the book, but a pensive listing of the most impactful moments of the book for me personally. Please forgive my extraordinarily INFJish digressions.
Storm was correct...I'm completely enraptured with this book.
I did not know what to expect when I started reading. I did not doubt that its content could be of significance to me; some of my favorite books are ones that I picked up at a young age and have held closest to my heart for years, reading and rereading their pages for wisdom, comfort, nostalgia (Mara, Daughter of the Nile and The Golden Goblet by Eloise Jarvis McGraw, The Hittite Warrior by Joanne S. Williamson). But it is those literary relationships that caused me to doubt what impact a new book could make on me.
Will I never learn?
There is a passage of the book that remarks on the population of Earth not actually being so large in comparison to the actual size of our planet. It's noted that if all the occupants of Earth were to stand together in one place, as if for one giant social gathering, that we would take up no more space than that of one tiny island. And yet, the narrator remarks, adults do not believe this; they want to believe they take up much more room.
We are all so focused on making our impact on this world. We want to leave something behind for someone to remember us by, change the way the world turns after we leave it. There's a thousand songs about rewriting the stars, changing one's destiny, charging forward into the eternal void with no knowledge of the future but with surety of our own success.
I think we worry so much about success, that we actually forget to succeed.
The Little Prince is the story of a young boy who lives alone on a teensy planet. He leaves his home in order to see the wonders of the universe. He visits seven different planets, meeting someone new on each planet who each teach him something about himself and shape his universal paradigm. The story begins with a narration by a man of Earth who has crashed his plane in the Sahara desert and, in the midst of fearing death, meets the alien boy and strikes up a curious friendship.
He and the boy speak of the many things the boy has seen in his quest of the universe, the lessons he's learned...
Beauty is not understanding why or how everything works—such as a seed growing from the ground—but in just enjoying that it does.
There is joy in chasing a sunset.
If you want to see the butterflies, you have to put up with the caterpillars.
You have to "tame" something—create ties to it—to find its value.
On the boy's home planet resides a single rose. The rose is vain and boastful, claiming that she is the only one of her kind in the entire universe. She would often complain to the boy when it was too cold, too windy, or when she was too lonely, too misunderstood. She would make requests of him and he would oblige her time and time again, with no reason aside from that she asked him to. When the boy leaves, she is sad but he does not understand why because she has never appeared to care for him.
When he gets to Earth, he encounters a garden full of thousands of roses. At first he falls to the ground and weeps, exclaiming that "I thought I was rich because I had just one flower, and all I own is an ordinary rose."
He meets a wild fox, who implores the boy to tame him. The boy does not understand why the fox—who is free—would like to be tamed. The fox explains to the boy that he is but one of a thousand foxes. The fox sees hundreds of humans, each as unimportant to the fox as the next. To be tamed by one would be to create a tie to the human. He remarks that if the boy were to tame him, he would no longer be just a boy with flowing blonde hair, but he would be the boy with flowing blonde hair that the fox would be reminded of each time he glanced at the fields of glistening wheat. They become friends, tied to one another, and when it is time for the boy to leave, the fox is sad. The boy does not want the fox to be sad but reminds him that it was the fox's own choice to be tamed by the boy. The fox replies:
"You risk tears if you let yourself be tamed."
But the fox does not regret being tamed by the boy, for he knows that he will be reminded of his time with the boy each time he sees the wheat fields, and he will be glad.
The boy once again comes upon the the garden of roses, and the impact of his friendship with the fox changes his perspective of the relationship to his home planet's sole rose. He addresses the garden of roses:
"But my rose, all on her own, is more important than all of you together, since she's the one I've watered. Since she's the one I put under the glass. Since she's the one I sheltered behind the screen. Since she's the one for whom I killed the caterpillars (except the two or three for butterflies). Since she's the one I listened to when she complained or when she boasted, or even sometimes when she said nothing at all. Since she's my rose."
I'm quite as emotional now as I was while reading the book. As a mother, I can't help but think of the relationship with my children. There are billions of children, but only three are my own. I have created my ties to them, cultivated my relationship with them in the small litany of daily events that we often take no notice of...hugs in the morning as soon as they open their eyes and greet me bleary-eyed from their bedrooms; kisses and prayers as they leave for school; questioning how their day was as soon as I see them after school; reading under the covers together at bedtime; kissing them good night and reminding them how loved they are.
Despite my unconditional, unequivocal, all-encompassing love for them, even I get stuck behind what my idea of parenting is in comparison to actually parenting. Sometimes we are so focused on going to work, making that money, and being successful so that we can provide for them the kinds of lives we always dreamed we would provide for our children.
We all work so hard for the lives we think we deserve, the lives we've imagined for ourselves or for our children. We focus so much on raising them that sometimes we forget to set it all aside and actually raise them.
We focus so much on making an impact on this world that we forget to actually make a difference.
We focus so much on counting everything that is ours, recording and calculating and measuring so that we know what we are leaving behind. How much do we take for granted?
We are focusing on the wrong things, and I am definitely including myself in that.
I wake up in the morning and I worry about editing "X" many pages today, or posting on Instagram "X" many times so that my business can be successful.
I check off my list of chores. After all, the more I accomplish, the more successful I am.
I check the dollar amount in the bank account. They are what determine what kind of life we are going to have, right?
What's that saying? You get out of it what you put into it. That phrase is wholly reborn for me now. Do you want meaningful relationships? Then put your time and heart into them.
You want to have a successful career. But how should we be defining success? By the dollar bills that will mean nothing to us when we are gone? Or by the joys we experience when we are "successfully" working at jobs we love?
Sometimes it's painful to put so much of ourselves into something or someone. Aren't we risking everything? What if our roses stab us with their thorns? What if we leave them alone to wither and die? What once was an ordinary rose, so alike to billions of others, would suddenly be our undoing.
"You risk tears if you let yourself be tamed."
I want to risk the tears. I want to see the butterflies. I want to see the sunsets.
I want the joy.