And since my shoes have travelled a great deal, especially in recent weeks, I’m going to allow myself an hour’s rest to write you about time, my time in particular. Time that slips away from us, time that never quite arrives, time that is already gone, and the sweetest time I know – time become a memory.

I don’t know if it’s like this for you, but I am always busy. In the community, it’s Antoine who constantly reminds me….

- Ah, Jonathan, still in front of the computer!
- I just have one little thing to finish, Antoine.
- Right! Just one more little thing to finish, until the next little thing that has to be finished …

Antoine, I love you! You always say exactly what needs to be said – you are sagesse sur deux pattes (loosely translated as “a bundle of wisdom on two legs”) as my great-aunt on my mother’s side would say. So I slow down, a little, to watch my growing eggplants. I take the time to sit on the ground and let the breeze from the sugar cane caress my hair and my warm skin. Suddenly, I tell myself that we should all have time to watch our eggplants grow. Spending time this way brings about a wonderful calm - a calm that would make the silence of the night envious. The same kind of calm told of in the following story. Do you know it?

Emperor Hirohito of Japan was a very busy man. You can probably imagine what that task might entail, being Emperor of a country like Japan, where everything is ordered and regulated by very strict laws. There’s nothing relaxing about that job, I assure you. From morning to night, every minute of the Emperor’s time was scheduled - a meeting, an appointment, an inspection, etc. Then, one day, he was called to attend another meeting in the middle of a big conference room. Imagine his surprise when he arrived and found no one in the room. He went in, alone, stood still a moment, and knelt down in the empty room. Then he turned to his assistants and said: “We should plan such moments more often. It’s been a very long while since I have been so aware of time.”

When we are too busy, we don’t have enough time. It’s a universal truth that is blindingly obvious. And even if I wouldn’t go so far as to advocate a three-hour workday as French socialist thinker Paul Lafargue did, I secretly dream of a Prime Minister who would forbid a workday that is more than six hours long. But – we slip into the worn-out shoes of our ancestors and we travel the unfamiliar path of our own life. Do we ever know that a small pleasure may be hiding on the edge of a ditch?

One of my small pleasures is to get up early, about 5 a.m., to stand and look out at the fog enveloping the fields that surround the house. Like a mother who protects her little two-month old, the night’s stillness holds the everyday beauty of mother nature in her breast. It is in the early morning, our eyes still a little sticky from too little sleep, that we can breathe into our beings the very grandeur of life.

Slowness is to life what water is to the body. Invisible, but essential. This truth – it is Vinvince who has taught me this truth– one of the most relaxed men I have had the pleasure of meeting in my short life. And, believe me, what one notices about Vinvince, before anything else, is his calm, profound smile.

The smile of someone who has understood.

As for me today – well, my shoes have carried me some distance, to this world of simple pleasures and of living in the present: Even if I spend so much time running that I don’t notice it …

Antoine the Wise Man

Morning from my window in Les Cailles

Hapiness sleeps at the end of my old shoes ...