Today in our company we had an interesting topic by our Health and wellness team. I was pleased that the conflicting meeting got canceled, which allowed me to attend the session.
It was nostalgic to go through the different books I read as a kid, remember how they made me feel, and think about the effect as I grew up.
“Words do have power. Names have power. Words are events, they do things, change things. They transform both speaker and hearer; they feed energy back and forth and amplify it. They feed understanding or emotion back and forth and amplify it.”
— Ursula K. Le Guin, The Wave In The Mind
There were a lot of great books covered and the one that touched me the most was The Little Prince.
Even as a kid I love the story of the little prince and the travels that he did and the people that he met. The images of the the hat vs a boa constrictor swallowing an elephant, the rose, the fox, the snake and that endless desert.
Yet the most memorable to my young mind were the different planets which later on I would understand more are a critique on the different aspects of adult society
We had the
- A king with no subjects, who only issue orders that will be followed, such as commanding the sun to set at sunset.
- A conceited man who only wants the praise which comes from admiration and being the most admirable person on his otherwise uninhabited planet.
- A drunkard who drinks to forget the shame of drinking.
- A businessman who is blind to the beauty of the stars and instead endlessly counts and catalogs them in order to "own" them all (critiquing materialism).
- A lamplighter on a planet so small, a full day lasts a minute. He wastes his life blindly following orders to extinguish and relight the lamppost every 30 seconds to correspond with his planet's day and night.
- An elderly geographer who has never been anywhere, or seen any of the things he records, providing a caricature of specialization in the contemporary world.
Info gotten from The Little Prince Wikipedia entry
Funny how the difference of reading The Little Prince when you are a kid and are still optimistic about how you can and be able to do anything. Growing up and getting repeatedly pushed down you become jaded and a cynic to the beauty of life.
From being able to think how each of the inhabitants of each planet is dumb but as an adult you find yourself being one or a combination of them.
At different stages of my life I was the different inhabitants. I was the king who thought that being that terror leader and commanding people. You either shaped out or you ship out was a favorite quote then.
I was the conceited man who lived to get the praise and approval of the people around me. I had become a people pleaser in order to be liked and admired to the point that it was harder to keep up,
I had become a drunkard in an effort to fit in and belong.
A businessman who only thought of going up the ladder in order to get more money and power. To hold material happiness as the top-level gauge if my life was good.
A lamplighter who just went through the motions of life.
A geographer who stopped living and just goes to live voraciously through the lives and experiences of others.
In a way I had lost my purpose and the way to move forward. I lost that ability to appreciate life, to be able to look at life with the eyes of a child.
So this session was great as it helped me reflect and think. To remember the life lessons that I learned from before.
What is your favorite children's book?