To shine like the stars

Have you ever waited ten hours in an airport for your next flight? It is more than the third part of a day. Having arrived there from Atlanta, I was in Salt Lake City airport, waiting for my flight to Southern Oregon. Those ten hours were good for a rest, and to write some travel notes. Also, an opportunity for contemplation and reflection. Airports are very interesting, because so many different people from all around the world are there.

After lunch, I decided to contemplate people. Backpackers backpacking. One carrying just a messenger bag. A man with a nice shirt and fine red-brown shiny shoes, with almost no luggage. Young girls all by themselves, maybe only for a while. Nice faces, bored faces, cool people, weird people. Young, old, babies, infants and children. Thousands of stories, some of them intermingling with one another. I wished I could to hear those stories. There’s so much to learn from everyone.

All that people reminded me of a Zen story in ancient China. The emperor was on a terrace with a Zen master, watching the Yang Tze river. Hundreds of boats were sailing to and from different parts of China. The emperor was elated at the sight. He asked the master, “how many boats you think are there, sailing our country?” The master replied, “I see only two. One is called fame, the other is called profit. That is what most of that people are living for.” I wondered how many of the people I saw in the airport were after that too.

We spend so much of our given time looking for the pot at the end of the rainbow. It’s here today, and gone tomorrow. There are the stars in the night sky. They serve us to find our way when sailing the oceans. Some of those stars were extinguished several thousands of years ago. But their light still travels throughout the universe, and guide our way. There were men of old who have left traces for us. Art, literature, philosophy, buildings… they left us an example, and a guide for our life. They shine in the sky of our lives, like the light of the stars. Can we say they are dead?

We can give our time to the quest for the pot at the end of the rainbow. We can also find a balanced way, and give some time to leave something behind us. Something that cannot be destroyed by fire or water. That is not lost if the stock market falls down. Something that will take us to shine like the stars, forever and ever.