Love the Desert

Hola!

There are places that come back to our memory again and again, at certain moments of existence, perhaps because they have something powerful to tell us. This has been, over the years, my relationship with the desert.

Ever since I listened to The Little Prince on vinyl as a child, in the solitude of my room, the seas of sand attracted me irresistibly. Perhaps because of what Saint-Exupéry said: “The beauty of the desert is that somewhere it hides a well.”

The most memorable moment of my first trip to Morocco was feeling the loneliness in the middle of the dunes that moved around me, changing the landscape every moment. On my second trip to India, spending the night under the stars in the Thar desert was another taste of eternity.

Last month I travelled with an old friend, ambassador to Oman, to a desert in this Gulf country.

What is the reason for this fascination with deserts? How is it that many religions have been born in places like this? The priest and writer Pablo d’Ors, whom I spoke about a couple of weeks ago, explains it this way in his short novel The Friend of the Desert :

“When I say I love the desert, what do I say I am loving? Burning sand during the day and freezing at night? The many and varied forms of the dunes? The starry sky and the enormous moon, like a living and mistaken star? Loneliness? The void? Maybe I just love the concept of the desert, and maybe I love it because I want to be like it. I love the desert because it is the place of absolute possibility: the place where the horizon has the breadth that man deserves and needs. The desert: that metaphor of infinity.”

In our exploration of Ikigai since we published the first book with Héctor García, 6 years ago, the desert also had an important meaning.

Every time we exhaust a vital purpose or our life, for whatever reason, before being reborn to another life, we cross an existential desert. On our journey between two oases there seems to be nothing, but there is a lot of hidden life, and very important things happen while we cross it; between them:

• We realize that we are much stronger than we thought. Fear of loss, once overcome, turns into courage and resilience.
• In the desert we find new friends who are also heading to the next oasis. With them we talk about past and future adventures, together we fill the present with infinite possibilities.
• The void that opens before us is an immense canvas with a very clear message: this is your life, and there is nothing, precisely, so that you can express what you want in it. The desert is freedom.

Inevitably, there will be moments in our journey through the desert when we will feel faint, perhaps the past and the present will hurt us, and we will believe that we are crossing hell itself. When we feel this way, let us remember this reflection by Winston Churchill:

“If you go through hell, don’t stop; keep going.”

Happy week!

Francesc