What Tolstoy Knew #022

Hello, welcome again to Every Dawn. This morning, I was looking through my books, and I found this book with stories by Leo Tolstoy. Leo Tolstoy was a writer of the 19th century in Russia, and he's famous because his books and his stories often have a message that is sometimes based on Christianity but often is a broader human message about what it means to be alive, what it means to be a human being, and what it means to behave in a moral way. They are often moral parables and they show a very deep understanding of the human condition.

So, this one I happened to look at today is one that is called "How Much Land Does a Man Need?" and I always found that this story has a very strong impact on me, and it's a very interesting story. It is a story about a man who hears that far away, somewhere, there's a tribe, and this tribe is giving land away to everyone, and they give away as much land as the person can circle around within a day. This man thinks this is great; he can go, he can get land for free, and then he can open his farm there and he can feed his family and he doesn't need to be in the city anymore.

He goes and he asks the elders of this tribe, "Is it true?" and they say, "Yes, it's true. Just go and walk around a piece of land and this will be yours." The man starts walking and he has to be back by sunset. So now it's morning, he starts walking in the morning, and he goes a few kilometers to one side, a few kilometers to the other side, and he sees that he already has covered a huge area of land. But then he thinks, "Why should I stop here? There are still so many hours until sunset. I can just keep going and I just have to look at the clock so that about half the day I have to start going back. Otherwise, I will not make it back before sunset."

And so he keeps going and going, and now it's noon. The sun is shining, it's very hot, he's sweating, he has forgotten to take water with him because he wanted to go light so that he can go faster and cover more land. The sun is shining on him but he's still pushing ahead, and he says, "No, I don't go back yet, I will go a little longer, and then perhaps on the way back, I can go a little faster and then I will have even more land and I will be even richer." He keeps going, going, and then at some point, he realizes that he's not going to make it back in time if he does not return immediately and if he does not start running on the way back.

So he returns and he runs back to the point of origin in order to close the circle and become the owner of all this land. And so he keeps running and running and it's getting hotter and hotter, the sun is shining, the sun finally goes closer to the horizon, and now the shadows are getting longer and he's still running, and he cannot anymore, he doesn't have enough breath, he doesn't have any water, he feels like he's going to faint, but he can see far away in the distance the end point, and he can just make it. He looks at the sun and as the sun is slowly setting behind the hills, and still half visible, he knows that if he runs a little faster, he can make it. He increases the pace and runs a little faster, a little faster still, although he cannot run anymore, and just as the sun is setting behind the hill, he arrives at the starting point, drops to the ground, and is dead.

And the men of the tribe, obviously, this not being the first time they've seen this, they just take a shovel and make a hole six feet, put him in, cover him with earth, and the story ends noting that this is, in the end, all the land this man needs, and every man just needs six feet of land — enough to bury their body.

I always found this an interesting parable for the way we live because in our everyday lives, when we do all these things that we do, you know, I'm teaching at the university, I'm making these videos, I hope to make money with these videos or with books that I write or with anything else that I do, and you have your own dreams, you have your own pursuits, you work in a company, you want to become someone bigger in this company to rise into some management position, other people may work in a hospital and dream of becoming the chief doctor in there.

So, we all have these aspirations and we all spend our life in a similar way like this man, running after more and more and more land that we need to cover, but we often forget what waits for us at the end of it.

Because at the end of all this, we are not going to take anything with us. At the end of all this, we will be just like this man, and it really doesn't matter how much land he covers. The point is not that he should not have been greedy. I think this is how we can misunderstand the story.

The point is not that he should not have been greedy; if he had not been greedy, the end would have been the same, only a few years later, he would still have died, he would still have needed only six feet of land. The point is that whatever we do, we never need more than six feet of land because six feet is all that we need in order to bury us when we are dead, and we will all be dead. So, this is something to remember whenever you chase something, whenever you see others chase something, try to visualize that there is no point really to all this because in the end, all of us, those with big cars and the small cars, and the big skyscrapers and the small huts, we will all end up in six feet of land, and this is all the land a man ever needs.

Thank you, and see you tomorrow. Bye-bye.