📝📝：Metaphorical Kid & Intangible love

The metaphor of little kid

When I saw the scene in which The Little Prince was back to his lovely Planet, B612. It triggered me to fall into an emotional overwhelming. All of a sudden, my breast bone started to hurt, my throat tightened, and tears welled in my eyes.

I thought to myself I don’t want to feel this, and I wanted to look away to escape from the overwhelming feeling I’d never had. Because I know I was not so much loved when I was a little kid. And even I grew up and forgot about those heart-breaking memories. I still had the feeling of guilt for having ignored the little kid deep in my mind for so long. That’s the main reason why I was crying like a baby at that scene.

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The metaphor of a kid is quite common when people first came into the Little Prince. As the author said on the book cover:

“All grown-ups were once children although only a few of them remember it.

However, for me anyway, the little kid is inherently personal, which directly tells a story of how I seek happiness, peace, and most importantly, the love I long for. Learning how to accept love and welcome its coming is to let love crack you open even though the feeling of it was so unbearably emotional when I first came to it.

That feeling is always hovering over the background while I was on the journey to B612. I have tried so hard to understand the ideas behind a whole bunch of metaphors and even dig down deep into the text, trying to figure out what the author wants to convey.

But, later on, I think the point is not what the author elaborates but what you have learned and gained from the novel. In my view, the little prince can be the entryway to know yourself even better, and it can also be a helping hand on life’s journey whenever you are thrown into the abyss of despair.

Intangible love from Mother Nature

It is, of course, tempting to share love with others. However, it is also somehow stubborn for everyone to solve the puzzles of personal mystery while loving someone. As Lukas Graham, a Danish singer I love so much, put it,

“When you love someone, you are not afraid to lose them.”

I had no idea of the song especially this lyric because it is inevitable for me to be afraid of losing whoever I love. Just to say, I could not get my head around why I am often radically chasing the sense of comfort from a relationship that obviously does not suit me at all. When I once bumped into another song with same title but from a singer whom I also deeply love, Jason Mraz, and he put it this way:

“When you love someone, it comes back to you.”

I came to realize that “radical hope” for me is to find my little kid back, and watching this film gives me the strength to look into my desire for love and my fear of being loved. The little prince makes the idea of that hope always available, no matter what, as Emily Dickinson put it, “never stops at all.”

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After I finished two-year talking therapy and recovered from depression, I began to pay more attention to trivial things, and then I realized happiness comes in various forms, such as a warm hug from a friend, the chirping of birds up in trees, or the burning feel of your muscles after a long walk. I was fortunate enough to find peace and calm while I am immersed in nature.

When I stood beside the beach, feeling the wave regularly washing my feet and the wind gently tickling my cheeks, or I lay down on the grass and looked up at the night sky, feeling my mind swimming and gazing at the stars flickering before the beauty and the distance. I learned to find the ecstasy hidden in ordinary joys because I did not expect those joys to be ordinary to me. All of a sudden, I resonated with what the Little Prince said

“Stars are beautiful because there is an invisible rose hidden in them.”

It worked for me as well. To be honest, it wasn’t until I was hugged by Mother Nature that I realized it could be a form of love, a love from a gigantic organism around me, but I didn’t pay attention to it for the last couple of years. The metaphor of the invisible rose can also be applied here; therefore, I put it this way:

“Nature is beautiful because there is an intangible love hidden in it.”