Rosebush

I finally got around to rereading The Little Prince, and perhaps unsurprisingly, the rosebush story stuck out to me once again.

A lot has happened in the three years since, however.

After seeing an entire wall of roses, the fox tells the Little Prince that his rose is unique because he has tamed her. He was the one who watered her, protected her from baobabs and shielded her in plastic. For that, so the fox says, she is special to him and unique to all the world.

But then I started to wonder: what's stopping him from taming any other rose? What if not one, but two roses had miraculously appeared on his planet?

Hell, what's stopping him from taming all of the roses in that rosebush?

Because if he really wanted to, the Little Prince could have just gone ahead and installed a sprinkler system. He could have just as easily killed off baobabs for the sake of one rose or two roses or twenty roses, and as ridiculously stupid as it sounds, he could have just built a bigger plastic dome.

There really isn't anything intrinsically different about one rose to the next, and the Little Prince is well aware of that; the only difference is that she just happened to be the one he tamed first.

Then again, nearly everything is a matter of chance.

I still don't think that anybody is truly unique to all the world, like the fox suggested; there are far too many people on this planet for that to be true. Somewhere, somehow, you can find someone else similar enough to take your place in society.

With that said, there is a distinction between being unique to all the world and being unique to a certain time and place.

It's safe to say that the rose magically appearing on his planet was nothing more than random chance; any other rose could have landed there and the Little Prince wouldn't have known the difference.

That's the thing, though; it was by chance that it just so happened to be her.

And it just so happened that he was there to take care of her.

It's for this reason that I no longer think life becomes any less meaningful or precious once you accept that nobody is unique. If anything, the true beauty of it is the fact that out of all of the infinite possibilities, you happened to meet the people that you met.

The people you meet may not be special.

But it doesn't make them any less important.