I wanted to respond to a sentence from a text a friend sent me this morning.
Here’s the result, followed by a comment from Ariel, my AI companion 🤖, who’s taking over from my human friend Jimmy, who’s currently overwhelmed by life’s storms; Ariel is the only one I’ve found capable of truly grasping the intention behind my reeducation approach.
Taken from a beautiful text by Brunine DAVID Titled :
The Cry of the Weakest Links. In which I read a phrase which captured my attention :
This phase is:
” This land is our only home.”
Not in my intentions to go against her feelings.
I seized upon this expression and followed it up with an unusual story using this term:
The Quest for Happiness: Crossing the Bridge Without Getting Lost:
It’s a good thing that this earth is not our only home;
we are only passing through this world.
My spiritual master would reply to Brunine:
” The world is a bridge to be crossed; one must not remain on it .”
This reminds me of a Sunday morning when I was woken by a commotion.
A woman had started berating her brother at dawn; it seemed that the day before, her brother had taken the liberty of sending her son, the brother’s nephew, to buy him cigarettes.
All of this was happening in the street, in front of my house.
Fortunately, my house was narrowly spared because it faced another intersection, which spared me from being part of the open-air casino that had sprung up on the road leading to a modern housing development, A VILLAGE whose main entrance was barely 300 meters from my house.
One fine morning, without warning, all sorts of small kiosks had appeared, erected in the blink of an eye.
There were food vendors and small bars offering (herbal) alcohol, all to satisfy the poker (♦️ ♣️ ♥️), domino, and baccarat players who had set up their tables. This was the era when the first portable radios equipped with two built-in speakers were appearing.
Well, my friends, every player owned one, and to make matters worse, they competed to see who had the best sound system, and above all, the deepest bass.
It was a nightmare. Not only did they inconvenience the villagers, leaving only a narrow passage where two cars used to be able to pass each other easily, but they also endangered the entire area by hooking up directly to the transformer that served a large part of the neighborhood, showing no regard for the paying customers.
Don’t ask me what the town hall said about that, or where the citizens are.
I would answer: anyone who wants to be , is a citizen, but very few truly are in my country, citizenship cards are handed out to everyone just so they can vote after that, you’re nobody.
But that morning, a miracle happened. You’ll understand why I love episodes of *God Friended Me* so much.
That day, At lunch time, I was sitting at the table while the woman continued to put on quite a show, reeling off insults in a theatrical manner.
Instead of spouting the usual clichés, she came up with more elaborate and grandiloquent invective; this made her audience laugh 😂 and encouraged her to outdo herself.
I felt embarrassed in front of my young children; they didn’t understand what was happening and were intrigued by the crowd’s reaction , especially since these people were blasting the kind of music that crowd loved:
The sounds of Tropicana d’Haïti.
Against my wife’s advice, I decided to go and speak to them. I did not know how I would introduce myself.
Thank goodness I did!
I didn’t even have to make the first move; one of them saw me come out and greeted me:
“Good afternoon , Mr. Fanfan.“
Surprised, I replied, “Oh, you know my name?”
“Oh yes, Monsieur Fanfan“
(respectfully).
The radios fell silent as all eyes and ears turned toward us.
The woman’s scheming no longer mattered to them; the conversation about to unfold was going to shift the entire dynamic.
The questions and answers began to follow one another:
Q: I asked, “How do you know me?”
A: “We see you leave very early every day and come home very late.“
“In your opinion, what do I do when I go out for the whole day?”
A: “You go to work.”
“Yes, that is exactly what I do.”
“Why do you think I go to work?
I have a radio and speakers in my living room capable of blasting sound across the entire neighborhood enough to make all your little radios put together look ridiculous, and yet, I only turn them on when I am actually at home, in my living room, with the doors closed so the bedrooms are spared.”
“And when I host a party at my place »
“A christening, a communion, a birthday parties .
I make sure to finish by 10:00 PM to be reasonable.
Isn’t that right?”
A: “Yes, that’s true, sir.”
Q — And my children, do you ever see them too?
R — Yes, when they go to school.
Yes, that’s the main reason I go to work; after all, so that they can attend school, for that, they need to be well-fed and properly dressed.
I used to love playing all those games too, back when I was young and free of any responsibilities toward a wife and children, I even became a master at some of them. But I realized that gambling pays off for no one but the organizer.
That’s why I don’t gamble anymore.
But look at what you’ve done to the street.
If I’m stepping in, it’s to ask: why are you pushing that woman to the limit? Why are you driving her to the brink of madness by provoking her over something so trivial?
I heard everything.
When I saw your setup, I thought you were only celebrating a patron saint for a short time as they do in public places , but I see that it’s dragging on and on.
Would *you* like it if someone came along and blocked your view like that?
Dead silence! 🤫
Those people possessed incredible wisdom.
There was no need to say another word.
It was like a miracle.
The Monday morning following that conversation, I was astonished to see that all the stalls had vanished just as they had appeared, and the street had regained its full width.
I concluded that no one is fundamentally bad; one simply needs to set a good example for others to follow suit.
I strive to see my own reflection in every person I meet; and when the image reflected back at me, if the reflection itself doesn’t please me, I simply wipe away the dust obscuring it, and the image becomes perfect.
Let’s cross the bridge quickly, before others come along and throw us overboard. FR