Daily Insight from the Story of The Little Prince

When people argue, fight, or fall out with each other and retreat to their corner, it's almost always over some petty issue that doesn't matter a hill of beans in the long run.

As the Little Prince is beginning to realize with the love of his life, we take each other far too seriously much of the time, as if the existence of the universe depended on our "position" on an issue prevailing.

The antidote to this is to detach from having to get our way.

We don't detach from caring about the person, only from trying to control them. Once we cease the dominance game, we can at last really connect with them. Because no one feels cajoled or manipulated, each comes as a free entity to share life together. This is when relationships become beautiful.

Even as we fight for control over nonsensical issues, we also become offended so very easily, taking personally anything that's done or said that doesn't bolster our ego. This too is the opposite of detachment, because we are focused on our own sensitivities. We are turned in on ourselves, narcissistic.

So attached to our own reactions are we that we aren't able to consider the other's needs. We can only truly care for people when we are detached from the impact they have on us.

At the root of these behaviors is the simple reality that we haven't yet learned to be ourown person. Our sense of identity is to a large degree dependent on what others think of us or say to us or about us.

The Little Prince has become discouraged in his relationship with the flower on his planet. Upset by her antics, he left. Now, light years away on Earth, he begins to realize that he ought not to have paid attention to her egoic self-indulgence.

He should just have accepted her, realizing that her egoic statements weren't who she really was.

Missing her, he wishes he had simply enjoyed her beauty and breathed her fragrance. "Mine perfumed all my planet," he confesses. "But I did not know how to take pleasure in all her grace."

We are alone in life, wishing we had a friend or a lover with whom to share ourselves. Then along comes someone we really enjoy.

But pretty soon we are seeing all their egoic faults, all the aspects of what they say that stem from what Eckhart Tolle calls "the pain-body," which St. Paul refers to as "sin [missing the mark, like shooting an arrow and missing the target, in other words not being true to ourselves] that dwells in our members," none of which is who we really are but is just accumulated hurt from the past.

Sadly, we start reacting to the person's weaknesses, the ways they aren't true to themselves, instead of recognizing this isn't who they are at all.

To the degree we don't see our own wonderfulness, our inherent worth, our loveliness as a person, we won't see this in others for long. We'll initially adore them, then complain about them.

The Little Prince, long gone from his planet and his flower, tells the airman who has crashed in the Sahara desert:

The fact is that I didn't know how to understand anything! I ought to have judged by deeds and not by words. She cast her fragrance and her radiance over me. I ought never to have run away from her.

You watch people in the drama they generate in relationships and it's simultaneously sad and laughable. A certain look, a glance, a particular statement, and we are either at each other's throat or distancing ourselves. How pathetic can we be?

The Little Prince makes such an insightful observation at this point in the eighth chapter of the story:

I ought to have guessed all the affection that lay behind her poor little strategems. Flowers are so inconsistent!

We can only see to the heart of another person, instead of the inconsistent surface presentation of themselves they offer us, if we are coming from our own heart.

Relationships, then, are inevitably full of drama and tumult because this is intended to rid us of dependence on anyone else for a sense of ourselves, driving us deep into our own center where we discover the only reliable sense of identity we can ever have.

Now, at last, we are able to connect meaningfully and appreciatively.