The Caravan That Lost Its Way
Short story about the sentence that has to be said out loud.
By the fourth day the arguing had stopped, which was worse than the arguing. Twenty-two men, sixty camels, four days south of where they should have been.
That night somebody remembered the old man at the back with the salt.
He listened to all of it and said, "Yes. You are lost."
"We know we're lost."
"No. For four days you have each been telling a story in which someone else is at fault and the road is just behind your own shoulder. Being lost is a place. You haven't arrived in it yet."
After a long pause the guide, silent since the second day, said out loud: "I do not know where we are."
Something went out of the group with that sentence. Not hope. Pressure.
Then they pooled what they actually had: birds at evening, a shape in the ridge, ground sloping down for two days — which nobody had mentioned, because it fitted nobody's theory.
They found water in a day and a half.
You cannot be found until you can say out loud where you actually are.
Ohananda.com
Sufi teaching stories on the path (tariqa) and the guide
Inspired by the Sufi tradition of the teaching story and its treatment of the path and the guide; the caravan and its characters are Ohananda's own.
Sufi literature is full of caravans, wrong turnings and guides, because the word for the path — tariqa — is also the word for the tradition itself.
This story turns on one refusal: the refusal to admit not knowing. Almost every tradition treats that admission as the first real step, and almost all of us resist it for four days. The old man gives no directions. He supplies the condition under which the group can use what it already knows.
What are you pretending to know your way through?
