“As for me,” said the little prince to himself, “if I had fifty-three minutes to spend as I liked, I should walk at my leisure toward a spring of fresh water.”
Antoine de Saint-Exupery, The Little Prince
A merchant is selling special pills—one pill will quench thirst for a whole week! A person will no longer need to find something to drink.
“Why are you selling those?” asks the little prince. Answer: Experts say they will save us fifty-three minutes per week.
“And what do I do with those fifty-three minutes?”
“Anything you like,” answers the merchant. And so, the little prince reflects on how he would spend the fifty-three minutes. He realizes he would like to do the very thing he has supposedly been ‘freed’ from.
In this anecdote from Saint-Exupery’s classic, we glimpse one of the ugly paradoxes of our age. We are short on time. And we struggle with how to use the ‘free’ time we have. And to top it off, we suffer from the lack of the very activities from which we have supposedly been ‘freed.’
A prime example is growing our own food. Another is writing letters, or splitting wood, or doing most anything else, by hand. Another is making our own music, or our own fun. We’ve even been freed from having to remember much at all, from the names of trees or presidents, to the way to get to someone’s house—who lives just across town.
To recognize and articulate this and other related problems is not to rant. Rather, it is to see things as they are. The challenge is the next step. What might be a positive, helpful approach?
We can take the approach of the little prince. Just say ‘no thank you.’ Thank you kindly, but I do not wish to be freed from certain things. I want to do them, because they are part of my inheritance. They are ordinary, enriching human actions.
This is a challenge requiring discernment and courage. And hard choices. Perhaps we begin with just one or two ordinary (but rich!) human activities.
And we seek to pass these on to our children and grandchildren. The reality is the little prince didn’t just happen to be born that way. Desires are born of experience.
To want to “walk at my leisure toward a spring” comes of walking at one’s leisure toward a spring. Tastes are formed by what we eat. Cultivation of wholesome desires is how Plato characterizes the whole project of education.
Let us take heart. There will always be springs of water, towards which we can walk—perhaps holding the hand of a friend, or a child. Human nature is on our side! What truly fulfills does not change. We can go out to meet it.
Fortunately, bad habits and disordered desires and actions always have an Achilles heel—in the end they do not satisfy. We can work for the food, and the water, that satisfies. And, thank God, that very work itself is part of what satisfies.
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Here are two short videos on rethinking the education of our children:
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So well said, John. I find that my struggle with time (which I’ve often considered my enemy) and my choices in how to use the precious time I have has been one of the biggest struggles in my life. I think part of the problem is that, to choose something human and good, one must accept the rejection (probably the wrong word) of other pursuits and activities that are also human and good. I would like whole lifetimes to just garden, just study philosophy, just study physics and astronomy, just play with my grandkids, just go hiking, just learn to work with herbs, just . . . Ultimately, I have to bring myself back to the Kingdom versus the temporary passage through this world. And when I do that, I want to spend my only lifetime just pleasing God. And that desire puts all the other “justs” in their proper places. But I still struggle . . . You seem to have been able to order your “justs” much better than I have!
Laura, You have expressed a great wisdom here. The desire to serve the Lord gives ground, context, and end to all our other desires. And I certainly appreciate your point about the difficulty of deciding what to give up. I doubt I’ve done any better than you have! It’s something we will simply keep working on–knowing that our whole life long we’ll still be trying to order things better!
Such beautiful insights and a beautiful reminder of enjoying the gift of an ordinary day! Thank you!
One key problem I see that many of us face is the very nature of the human built environment in which we live. I rent the first floor of a house, with two other tenants above us. We have about 2/3 of an acre for the kids to play on somewhat near a busy road. We have a garden and have for a number of years but we can’t very well turn the whole 2/3 of an acre to account, given that it’s not ours and the other tenants use it too. We can’t afford a house, and if we could it would only be even smaller than where we currently are. Et cetera.
How to cultivate true excellences, especially for young children, in a place where there is almost literally nothing to do? (That is, nothing that “needs doing”.) Any efforts would have to be things we take on ourselves, as John says in the post. But what? Making bread is a good example, but how can we make things excellent that are ordered beyond our own little household? It seems that that is the key point. (I mean, for example, that cleaning is a good but, because it doesn’t orient us beyond the household, it is limited in how much true human good we can find in it. Whereas, if I were a carpenter and could teach my sons that, then I would be doing something that is directed beyond.)
Well, I don’t mean to sound frustrated! These are living insights that John is sharing here–that is clear. And I am convinced that somehow LAND and PLACE are keys to the answers. Any thoughts on how those relate to your points here, John? Thanks!