The apple grove was just a little further down the path, Sonya, a smart and happy 8th grader, was happily skipping towards it. There in a bench nearby sat an old man, perhaps as old as time. Sonya stopped as she had never seen him before. She walked towards the old man and stared at him unknowingly but out of curiosity. The old man stared back from behind eyes that looked like they had some secret to tell, he had seen it all, the rise and fall, the ups and downs of life. He looked at Sonya. Sonya finally found her words and asked, ” Who are you? Ae you from a nearby village, never saw you here before”. The old man replied, ” I came here just yesterday my dear. I have been walking a long time. See my shadow keeps following me and I wanted to find a place where it won’t attach with me anymore. I am just tired but i still have not found the place, so tomorrow I will continue my search.” Sonya looked a little surprised, she had studied about how at different times of the day, a persons shadow casts at different place. She asked, ” Why do you want to get rid of your shadow? That is the strangest thing I have heard. Don’t you know that any object with substance will cast a shadow. It just means that you are blocking a part of light from passing through you and to the ground. ” ” Aha”, said the old man, ” See my dear, I want this light to pass through me, I want to let the light through”. Sonya thought for a moment, finally asking”What for”. “I have been seeking to illuminate myself as such that I cast no shadows in my paths. I want to in a way dissolve and be a part of this world in such a way that my existence is synchronized with the universe and I drift along lightly enough to never block the light in the paths that I walk.” Sonya thought for sometime, she could not totally grasp what the old man was saying. ” I don’t really understand what you mean by that, but I think what you are trying to do is not really possible”, said Sonya. “My dear, its all in the mind, when you close your eyes, can you see yourself? It is not impossible, it is just that you are not willing to see it or believe that it is possible.” Just as he had finished saying that, night fell and his shadow could not be seen as it was too dark. Sonya said excitedly, ” I know what you can do, you can live in dark place all your life, so that way you never have to see your shadow. If you would like I could make a cave for you and bring you water and food. You know I could really do that.” The old man laughed, ” Thank you for your offer my dear. But I like being in the light, it is just that I want it to fill me up so much that I won’t cast a dark shadow anymore. In life, whenever you want to get rid of something dark you have to go towards the light. If you keep staying in the dark you will never see the dark shadow.” Saying this the guy got up and walked along, ” So long, little girl. I hope you always see the light, so that you may see your dark shadow and learn to illuminate yourself in such a way that the shadow gets smaller and smaller and maybe it will disappear one day, all you would need is a lot of light. ” Sonya, sat there in the bench a little while thinking what must this old man be going through and why he was looking for so much light to get rid of his shadow. She could not make much of it and it was getting late, so she got up and went towards her home. She kept a journal and she wrote the strange encounter with the old man in this journal that day. Years later, she would look at this journal and perhaps understand a little that the old man was trying to seek wisdom and that his shadow was his ignorance, that he was trying to get rid of.
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