I have heard about a man who remained unmarried his whole life, and when he was dying, ninety years old, somebody asked him, “You have remained unmarried your whole life, but you have never said what the reason was. Now you are dying, at least quench our curiosity. If there is any secret, now you can tell it because you are dying; you will be gone. Even if the secret is known, it can’t harm you.”
The man said, “Yes, there is a secret. It is not that I am against marriage, but I was searching for a perfect woman. I searched and searched, and my whole life slipped by.”
The inquirer asked, “But upon this big earth, so many millions of people, half of them women, couldn’t you find one perfect woman?”
A tear rolled down from the eye of the dying man. He said, “Yes, I did find one.”
The inquirer was absolutely shocked. He said, “Then what happened? Why didn’t you get married?”
And the old man said, “But the woman was searching for a perfect husband.”
If you think you are special then you are bound to create misery for yourself. If you think that you are higher than others, wiser than others, then you will attain a very strong ego. And the ego is poison, pure poison. And the more egoistic you become, the more it hurts because it is a wound. The more egoistic you become, the more you become unbridged from life. You fall separate from life; you are no longer in the flow of existence, you have become a rock in the river. You have become ice-cold, you have lost all warmth, all love. A special person cannot love, because where are you going to find another special person?
©The Dhammapada: The Way of the Buddha
