If ever you will get three solid hours of solitude — nothing and no one is waiting for you; no chance of anything or anyone distracting you; you’re in a relaxed and open mental state —  I suggest that you read this book, The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupery.  And if you won’t get that opportunity due to busy lifestyle, I suggest you make time to read parts of it while you’re taking a dump.  One chapter every time you do number two.  That’s not so taxing on your time.

And even if it did cut out a chunk of your time, it is a chunk not wasted, pun unintended.

The Little Prince  is a book for grown-ups who have become lost in the grown-up world; those who think they are concerned with matters of great consequences but actually, they are not.  It is a book for people whose life compass needs a little bit of re-calibrating.  Who among us doesn’t need life re-calibration one time or another?

The book looks and reads  like a children’s book and kids would surely love it.  But grown-ups who would read it with open and reflective mind would love it even more.  It doesn’t shove into you truths like what many preachers of exclusive religions do.  Instead, it gently invites you to suspend what you think is important and look at the world with the clear-sighted eyes of a child.

In the part of the book after the Little Prince has successfully befriended the fox, he went back to the garden and told this to the roses:

“You are not at all like my rose,” he said. “As yet you are nothing. No one has tamed you, and you have tamed no one. You are like my fox when I first knew him. He was only a fox like a hundred thousand other foxes. But I have made him my friend, and now he is unique in all the world.” And the roses were very much embarrassed.

 

“You are beautiful, but you are empty,” he went on. “One could not die for you. To be sure, an ordinary passerby would think that my rose looked just like you– the rose that belongs to me. But in herself alone she is more important than all the hundreds of you other roses: because it is she that I have watered; because it is she that I have put under the glass globe; because it is she that I have sheltered behind the screen; because it is for her that I have killed the caterpillars (except the two or three that we saved to become butterflies); because it is she that I have listened to, when she grumbled, or boasted, or even sometimes when she said nothing. Because she is my rose.”

Have you ever loved a book so much you want to quote all of it, you want to talk about it over and over again to anyone who cares to listen, you want to give copies of it to everyone if only you had the money?  That is how I love this book.  I share this love to you with hope you find the time to read the book.  You know, doing number two could be much more exciting, I’m sure of it.  :-)

Click The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupery to read the rest of the book in its PDF version.  (Will you really bring your laptop to the toilet?)