A baobab in the heart, a reflection from The Little Prince

If you find a baobab in your heart, tear it out by the roots, because its seeds harbor fear, insecurity, disappointment, anger… Do like the Little Prince, who every morning removed all the seeds from the titanic baobabs on his small planet for fear that they would grow too much, that their gigantic roots would destroy everything he loved and knew…

There are intelligent and non-phobic fears that guarantee our well-being. They are adjusted fears that regulate our survival. However, Sometimes and almost without knowing why, those baobab seeds arrive and invade everything.. They are right there, in the basement of our psychological garden, sometimes growing silently, but altering our balance, our focus.

“There are good seeds of good grasses and bad seeds of bad grasses. They sleep in the secret of the earth until one of them feels like waking up. Then she reaches out and, timidly at first, grows toward the sun a lovely harmless twig. If it is a sprig of radish or rose bush, you can let it grow as you like, but if it is a bad plant, you have to pull the plant out as soon as you can recognize it.”

–The little Prince–

Maybe Of all the reflections that Antoine de Saint-Exupéry left us in The little PrinceThis is undoubtedly one of the most interesting. In the book, the little protagonist daily uprooted the “bad” seeds from his planet while he fed and watered the “good” seeds. The bad ones were the baobab ones, the ones he had to root out before they destroyed his world from the inside. The good seeds, of course, were the rose bushes and specifically the one for which he had a special predilection.

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This subtle metaphor undoubtedly symbolizes the figure of our fears, of those darker areas where cognitive distortions often feed.. They are those germs orchestrated by rage, anguish or sadness that cloud and fill our mental palace with cracks.

A baobab in the heart, the one we all carry

We all carry a baobab in our hearts. Now, there may only be its seed, invisible, dormant and without any branching. Others, however, may already be suffering the effects of their growth. The impact of that baobab that expands its roots and that stirs, changes and destabilizes everything. Because fears, like grudges, implode until the internal order, logic, and autonomy are broken.

In The little Prince, its protagonist even asks the pilot at one point if lambs eat bushes. When he answers that he does, he reacts with immense joy at the thought that he will finally be able to get rid of the threat of the baobabs. However, soon the pilot corrects him: a baobab is not a bush, but a tree. They are trees as big as churches, so immense that not even a “herd” of elephants would be able to eat one whole.

The Little Prince, imagining the scene, suggested that perhaps it could be achieved by putting one elephant on top of another. Now, seconds later he very correctly warned that the best strategy could not be other than to prevent its growth. Because when a baobab grows too much nothing can be done. These destructive giants must be stopped in their earliest stages, when they are small, when they are nothing more than simple seeds.…

“The planet’s soil was infested with baobab seeds. And if a baobab is not harvested in time, it is never possible to get rid of it. It clogs the entire planet. It pierces it with its roots. And if the planet is too small and the baobabs too big, they blow it up.”

–The little Prince–

The importance of preventing a baobab from growing in the heart

There are those who see something more in the Little Prince’s baobab metaphor. There are those who warn that more than the seeds of our fears, there could also be the germ of evil itself.. That destructive force that sickens the heart and is capable of committing the worst acts, of giving shape to the most devastating scenarios of violence and destruction. The same ones that we all already have in our collective memory.

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After all, That baobab seed has always been and will always be present inside us. It is up to us to feed it and allow it to grow, because just like on the Little Prince’s planet, in all of us there are good seeds and bad seeds. Whether they germinate, whether they take root, undoubtedly depends on innumerable factors: our upbringing, education, lived experiences…

However, we cannot forget that it is It is in our power to be good and diligent gardeners. to remove weeds in time, the seeds that are useless, those that destroy the environment and break the natural balance of our personal plot. This skillful task is what the Little Prince carried out every day. He who removed what he didn’t want and he who nourished what he valued most: his rose bushes.

We don’t need lambs or an army of elephants standing on top of each other to carry out this cleaning task. If we have a baobab in our hearts, we have the responsibility to remove it in time or not to feed its seed. This maintenance task generates balance, provides wisdom and a sense of discipline. It allows us to be attentive to any change, any unusual growth to prevent small problems from turning into huge and terrifying baobabs.