THE HAPPY MAN HAD NO SHIRT

Seeing the happiness of these Peruvian children who belong to poor families, I recalled a story that a long time ago I read when I attended middle school.

Once upon a time, a king ordered his servants to bring him the shirt of a man who was really happy.

Hence, the servants went all around the kingdom, but they couldn’t find a happy man; everybody had some kind of misfortune. When their hope to find a happy man was about to die, unexpectedly they found a man singing in the open air.

“This man must be really happy! Let’s go to talk with him for a while!” they said.

After questioning him, they found that he was really a happy man. “Give us your shirt! We will take it to the king and he will give you a special award for that!” they said.

“Unfortunately, I don’t have any shirt,” the happy man answered, “I am so poor that I don’t own anything.”

The servants went back to the king and reported that they did find a happy man indeed, but he had no shirt.

The moral of the story is intuitive: happiness springs not from riches but from the spontaneity of the heart.

Ettore Grillo author of these books:
– A Hidden Sicilian History
– The Vibrations of Words
-Travels of the Mind
http://www.amazon.com/author/ettoregrillo