The Little Prince: A Lesson In Patience

I recently read an anthology by Will Schwalbe called Books for Living, which he describes as a manifesto for readers. It is a compilation of  lessons from variousbooks that he had read, which help him deal with the challenges of modern life and some of the issues that frustrate or puzzle him. One of the stories in the anthology was The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupery. Schwalbe titled the chapter containing the story “Finding Friends” but I think it would have been much more appropriate as a lesson on patience. The narrator is, like Saint-Exupery, a pilot. He meets the title character, who is an alien from another planet, in the desert where the narrator's plane has crashed. He needs to fix the engine soon or he will die of dehydration. 

The prince is traveling around the earth when he meets a fox who asks the prince to tame him. The prince at first refuses, saying that he has many things to learn, to which the fox responds “The only things you learn are the things you tame.” 

The fox tells the prince how to do this, saying that he must sit at a distance, not say anything and simply let the fox observe him. Over time, the prince will be able to sit closer as the fox learns to trust him. Patience is needed in many areas in life and is an essential requirement to learning any skill. Finding friends may not be difficult but maintaining friendships, or building relationships of any kind requires infinite patience. The fox tells the prince that language is the source of misunderstandings. In the digital age, we have become accustomed to an immediate response to our texts, calls and emails and when it doesn’t arrive, we become agitated and impatient, a phenomenon writer Stephen Miller classifies as communication anxiety. As anxiety increases, it leads us to be reactive.  Out of our fear of being ignored or taken for granted, we may speak impulsively and end up creating barriers instead of bridges.It may take years to build a friendship and just one ill-considered word to destroy it completely. 

The people we encounter in our daily lives teach us important lessons as well. I found and read this anthology shortly before receiving a phone call from a friend whom I hadn't heard from in a long time. We had known each other since childhood and she had always been an inconsistent communicator so I learned to accept that it was just a part of her personality. I assumed that maintaining a friendship required frequent communication especially when we were not able to see each other in person so I was usually the one who made the effort to keep in touch. When we did meet or talk, we were easily able to re-connect and had lengthy conversations. However, as the years passed, the communication became more sporadic. I tried reaching out several times but never got a call back, so I assumed that I must have said or done something that offended her.  My sense of insecurity caused me to feel hurt and rejected so I distanced myself and eventually stopped calling. Her recent phone call was to let me know that she had been dealing with some difficult personal issues that had consumed her focus, leaving little room for anything else. 

She asked me to be patient and not to give up on her because she relied on my support and advice to help her stay balanced. In her words I found the echo of the lesson in Saint-Exupery’s story. Perhaps the reason I was led to forming this friendship was to test my patience, a quality that I always assumed I had in abundance. Understanding this, I realized that I could afford to wait for her to get in touch, as there was nothing I really needed from her in a tangible sense. I was not sacrificing anything when she didn’t respond and it only made each conversation more rewarding when it did occur. In the words of French idealist philosopher and Jesuit priest Pierre Tiehard du Chardin, “it is the law of all progress that it is made by passing through some stages of instability-And that it may take a very long time.. “ Having patience when things didn’t go my way would help me progress on the path of my personal and spiritual journey, where I was bound to encounter bigger and more difficult challenges. Learning to exercise this quality was a way of building the strength I would need to face them.