The Moment
A man is dying of thirst in the Sahara. His plane lies broken in the sand, twisted metal baking under a sun that will not forgive. He has enough water for perhaps a week. There are no rescue parties coming. The silence is absolute, stretching for a thousand miles in every direction.
And then, a small voice: “Please, draw me a sheep.”
The boy who speaks is no taller than the pilot’s knee. He has golden hair and a scarf that moves in wind that does not exist. He does not ask where he is or how he arrived. He does not acknowledge the wreckage or the impossible distance to anywhere. He simply asks, with the certainty of someone who knows he will be answered, for a drawing of a sheep.
The pilot should say no. He should focus on the engine, the water rations, the very practical matter of not dying alone in the sand. Instead, he draws. The first sheep looks too sickly. The second too old. The third has horns - that is a ram, not a sheep. Each attempt fails to satisfy the strange child who materialized from nowhere.
Finally, exhausted and frustrated, the pilot sketches three holes in a box. “The sheep you asked for is inside,” he says.
The little prince’s face transforms with delight. “That is exactly the way I wanted it!”
Here, in this moment, something shifts. A man who stopped drawing elephants as a child because adults could only see hats - this man has just drawn the invisible. And a boy from an asteroid no bigger than a house has reminded him that the most real things often cannot be seen at all.
The Reflection
We spend our lives learning to see what is in front of us. The hat, not the elephant. The box, not the sheep. The practical interpretation that keeps us employed and responsible and integrated into the world of bridge and golf and politics. Somewhere in that education, we lose the ability to see through things, to let the invisible count for more than what our eyes can confirm.
But the invisible things do not disappear. The rose we left on our small planet. The elephant we stopped drawing. The laughter we could hear in stars if only we remembered how to listen. They wait in boxes we drew around them, patient as sheep, essential as water.
Perhaps wisdom is not learning to see what is real. Perhaps it is remembering that what is real was never only visible. That trust builds slowly, like morning light. That love changes us rather than completing us. That sometimes, when someone asks us to draw a sheep in the middle of our crisis, the most reasonable thing we can do is pick up the pencil.
The desert is still vast. The plane is still broken. But now there are two people in the sand instead of one, and one of them can see through boxes.
