The Dreamseller_ The Calling - Augusto Cury [92]
But, for him, time was a scarce commodity, he said. So he planned the trip months in advance. Everything was set, but at the last minute, he was asked to participate in a video conference with some of the company’s investors. Vast sums of money were involved. His family and friends postponed the trip by a day to wait for him. The next day, he had to quickly resolve a business matter that had been dragging for months: He had to sign off on the purchase of another large company or lose it to his competitors. Hundreds of millions of dollars were at stake. The trip was postponed again. On the day they were finally set to travel, the board of directors of his petroleum firm presented him with a new problem. More make-or-break decisions had to be made.
“So as not to put off the trip again, I apologized to my wife, my children and our friends and told them to go on without me. I would charter a flight later and meet them there,” he said, his voice beginning to crack. “My wife didn’t like the idea. My seven-year-old daughter, Julieta, was sad, but she kissed me and said, ‘You’re the best daddy in the world.’ Fernando, my loving nine-year-old son, also kissed me and said, ‘You’re the best father in the world—but the busiest, too.’ I answered, ‘Thank you, children, but someday Daddy will have more time for the greatest kids in the world.’”
The dreamseller heaved a deep and heavy sigh. “But that time would never come . . .” He paused and started to cry. In a choked voice, overcome with emotion, he told the audience:
“While I was in the middle of a meeting, hours after they had taken off, my secretary rushed in to say there had been a plane crash. My heart started to pound. I turned on the news and heard that an airliner had crashed into a dense tropical rain forest . . . and there did not appear to be any survivors. It was the flight they were on. I collapsed to the ground and cried inconsolably. I had lost everything. There was no air to breathe, no ground to walk on, no reason to live. Between tears and pain, I put together a rescue mission, but we never found my wife and children’s bodies; the plane had burned to a cinder. I couldn’t even say good-bye to the most important people in my life, to look into their eyes or touch their skin. It was as if they’d never existed.”
Overnight, the man so many had envied became the object of pity, the indestructible man became the most fragile of beings. And to add to his indescribable pain, he was tortured by guilt.
“The psychologists who treated me wanted to ease my guilt. They tried to tell me I wasn’t responsible for the loss. But I knew, indirectly, I was. They tried to protect me instead of making me face the monster of my guilt. But they couldn’t ease my desire to punish myself. They were good doctors, good men, but I resisted and closed myself up in my own world.”
Still reading out from the chapters of his past life for the audience, he began asking himself aloud:
“What did I build? Why didn’t I prioritize what I loved the most? Why did I never have the courage to cut back on my schedule? When is it time to slow down? What is so important that it is more important than life itself? If you lose that, what does it matter if you have all the money in the world?”
What an unbearable burden. What colossal pain. As I listened to him, I began to understand that all of us, however successful, we all miss out on something. The warm sun sets on us all, no one sails forever on tranquil seas. Some lose more, others less; some suffer avoidable losses, others unavoidable. Some lose