personal renewal...

Here are some excerpts from John Gardner's writings on "Personal Renewal"...

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Life is an endless unfolding, and if we wish it to be, an endless process of self-discovery, an endless and unpredictable dialogue between our own potentialities and the life situations in which we find ourselves. By potentialities I mean not just intellectual gifts but the full range of one's capacities for learning, sensing, wondering, understanding, loving and aspiring.

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We cannot dream of a Utopia in which all arrangements are ideal and everyone is flawless. Life is tumultuous -- an endless losing and regaining of balance, a continuous struggle, never an assured victory.

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"Meaning is not something you stumble across, like the answer to a riddle or the prize in a treasure hunt. Meaning is something you build into your life. You build it out of your own past, out of your affections and loyalties, out of the experience of humankind as it is passed on to you, out of your own talent and understanding, out of the things you believe in, out of the things and people you love, out of the values for which you are willing to sacrifice something. The ingredients are there. You are the only one who can put them together into that unique pattern that will be your life. Let it be a life that has dignity and meaning for you. If it does, then the particular balance of success or failure is of less account."

--John Gardner's writings

"Personal Renewal"
Delivered to Mckinsey & Company
Phoenix, AZ
Novemver 10, 1990

the little prince

I just happened to remember this book I read sometime last year, which made so much sense to me. But down the line I had almost forgotten about it until yesterday night when I was out for a drive and I dunno how and why and from where the whole of the story just popped back into my mind.

Originally written in French by Antoine de Saint Exupery in the year 1943 (just a year before his death), The Little Prince is an enigmatic and an elegiac fable about love, friendship, identity, relationship, imagination and creative thinking.

Here are a couple of excerpts from the book:

P.S. This might seem to be a very long post to read, but trust me, the excerpts here are worth reading, and I'm sure it will capture your interest, strong enough to make you read this book!

Chapter 7
..."If some one loves a flower, of which just one single blossom grows in all the millions and millions of stars, it is enough to make him happy just to look at the stars. He can say to himself, 'Somewhere, my flower is there...' But if the sheep eats the flower, in one moment all his stars will be darkened... And you think that is not important!"...

Chapter 9
...He believed that he would never want to return. But on this last morning all these familiar tasks seemed very precious to him. And when he watered the flower for the last time, and prepared to place her under the shelter of her glass globe, he realised that he was very close to tears. "Goodbye," he said to the flower. But she made no answer. "Goodbye," he said again. The flower coughed. But it was not because she had a cold.

"I have been silly," she said to him, at last. "I ask your forgiveness. Try to be happy..." He was surprised by this absence of reproaches. He stood there all bewildered, the glass globe held arrested in mid-air. He did not understand this quiet sweetness. "Of course I love you," the flower said to him. "It is my fault that you have not known it all the while. That is of no importance. But you, you have been just as foolish as I. Try to be happy... let the glass globe be. I don't want it any more." "But the wind..." "My cold is not so bad as all that... the cool night air will do me good. I am a flower." "But the animals..." "Well, I must endure the presence of two or three caterpillars if I wish to become acquainted with the butterflies. It seems that they are very beautiful. And if not the butterflies and the caterpillars who will call upon me? You will be far away... as for the large animals, I am not at all afraid of any of them. I have my claws." And, naively, she showed her four thorns. Then she added: "Don't linger like this. You have decided to go away. Now go!" For she did not want him to see her crying. She was such a proud flower...

Chapter 21
..."Just that," said the fox. "To me, you are still nothing more than a little boy who is just like a hundred thousand other little boys. And I have no need of you. And you, on your part, have no need of me. To you, I am nothing more than a fox like a hundred thousand other foxes. But if you tame me, then we shall need each other. To me, you will be unique in all the world. To you, I shall be unique in all the world..."

..."But I have not much time. I have friends to discover, and a great many things to understand." "One only understands the things that one tames," said the fox. "Men have no more time to understand anything. They buy things all ready made at the shops. But there is no shop anywhere where one can buy friendship, and so men have no friends any more. If you want a friend, tame me..."

..."It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye."

Chapter 25
..."The men where you live," said the little prince, "grow five thousand roses in the same garden ... and they do not find what they are looking for ..." "They do not find it," I replied. "And yet, what they are looking for could be found in a single rose or in a little water." "Yes, indeed," I replied. And the little prince added: "But the eyes are blind. One must look with the heart"...

Chapter 26
..."All men have the stars," he answered, "but they are not the same things for different people. For some, who are travelers, the stars are guides. For others they are no more than little lights in the sky. For others, who are scholars, they are problems. For my businessman they were wealth. But all these stars are silent. You, you alone, will have the stars as no one else has them" "What are you trying to say?" "In one of the stars I shall be living. In one of them I shall be laughing. And so it will be as if all the stars were laughing, when you look at the sky at night... you, only you, will have stars that can laugh!"...

Though relatively a short story, it's one the best books that I've ever come across. The only other book that I can parallel is The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho.