I Dream Away

I too have a dream of traveling around the globe. It could be tiring, it could be consuming time and efforts but in the end it could satisfy my curiosity of the world. 

There was a story told by Haruki Murakami in one of his books entitled After Dark. It was a story about three brothers who washed up on an island in Hawaii. The story goes something like this, in his own words.

Three brothers went out fishing and got caught in a storm. They drifted on the ocean for a long time until they washed up on the shore of an uninhabitated island. It was a beautiful island with coconuts growing there and tons of fruits on the trees, and a big high mountain in the middle. The night they got there a God appeared in their dreams and said, 'A little farther away down the shore, you will find three big round boulders. I want each of you to push his boulder as far as he likes. The place you stop pushing your boulder is where you will live. The higher you go, the more of the world you will be able to see from your home. It's entirely up to you how far you want to push your boulder'"

So the three brothers found three boulders on the shore just as the God had said they would. And they started pushing them along as the God told them to. The youngest brother quits first. He said, 'Brothers, this place is good enough for me. It's close to the shore and I can catch fish. It has everything I need to go on living. I don't mind if I can't see that much of the world from here. '

His two elder brothers pressed on, but when they were midway up the mountain, the second brother quit. He said, 'Brother, this place is good enough for me. There is plenty of fruit here. It has everything I need to go on living. I don't mind if I can't see that much of the world from here.'

The eldest brother continued walking up the mountain. The trail grew increasingly narrow and steep, but he didn't quit. He had great powers of preserverance, and he wanted to see as much of the world as possibly could, so he kept rolling the boulder with all his might. He went on for months, hardly eating or drinking, until he had rolled the boulder to the very peak of the high mountain. There he stopped and surveyed the world. Now he could see more of the world than anyone. This was the place he would live - where no grass grew, where no birds flew. For water he could only lick the ice and frost. For food, he could only gnaw on moss. But he had no regrets, because now he could look out over the whole world. 

The author concluded that the moral of the story is that if you really want to know something, you have to be willing to pay the price and another one is that people are all different. 

I want to see the whole world. What is the price that I have to pay? What kind of people I am?

I am a dreamer and I am dreaming away of the possibility of how far I can go to see this whole world.

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