The Little Prince asked the businessman on the planet:

 

“And what do you do with five-hundred millions of stars?”

“Five-hundred-and-one million, six-hundred-twenty-two thousand, seven-hundred-thirty-

one. I am concerned with matters of consequence: I am accurate.”

“And what do you do with these stars?”

“What do I do with them?”

“Yes.”

“Nothing. I own them.”

“You own the stars?”

“Yes.”

“But I have already seen a king who–”

“Kings do not own, they reign over. It is a very different matter.”

“And what good does it do you to own the stars?”

“It does me the good of making me rich.”

“And what good does it do you to be rich?”

“It makes it possible for me to buy more stars, if any are ever discovered.”

……

“How is it possible for one to own the stars?”

“To whom do they belong?” the businessman retorted, peevishly.

“I don’t know. To nobody.”

“Then they belong to me, because I was the first person to think of it.”

“Is that all that is necessary?”

“Certainly. When you find a diamond that belongs to nobody, it is yours.

When you discover an island that belongs to nobody, it is yours. When you get

an idea before any one else, you take out a patent on it: it is yours. So with me:

I own the stars, because nobody else before me ever thought of owning them.”

“Yes, that is true,” said the little prince. “And what do you do with them?”

“I administer them,” replied the businessman. “I count them and recount

them. It is difficult. But I am a man who is naturally interested in matters of

consequence.”

……

If I owned a silk scarf,” [The Little Prince] said, “I could put it around my neck and take

it away with me. If I owned a flower, I could pluck that flower and take it away

with me. But you cannot pluck the stars from heaven. . . “

“No. But I can put them in the bank.”

“Whatever does that mean?”

“That means that I write the number of my stars on a little paper. And

then I put this paper in a drawer and lock it with a key.”

“And that is all?”

“That is enough,” said the businessman.

“It is entertaining,” thought the little prince. “It is rather poetic. But it is

of no great consequence.”

On matters of consequence, the little prince had ideas which were very different

from those of the grown-ups.

 

I decided to share with you this week this little piece from the famous book: The Little Prince, by Saint Exupery.

After various phone calls asking me what I’m doing next after my “liberation”, I kept wondering: is it about using my time or about making money? And then this piece jumped my way and it turned out to be none of the above.

 

In a world where the value of a human is calculated through how much they own or how much knowledge they accumulated in their brains or how much blab they added to the world of words, it is very difficult to think outside of this circle and consider what is one to do with their lives that is not entirely consistent with their belief.

 

In the end, I would like to evaluate my life differently: I want to register the number of sunsets I watched and shared with a loved one, the number of birds I listened to in the morning just after waking up, the number of close people I heard talking and the amount of delicious food I enjoyed. with myself or others 

 

Or maybe worse! I just want to count the times I slept well and ate what I liked and played music or sang to myself.

 

Unfortunately, so far, I have a lot more money than any of the above … I am much poorer than I had earlier thought of myself!

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