Saving Fish from Drowning - Heal Burma

SAVING FISH FROM DROWNING
when she was overcome by the pounding drums. She and the others
believed for a moment that they inhabited one another’s minds, and
that was because they became the same mind. She wrote that it was
a delusion, of course. Yet it was a delusion worth having from time
to time. Sympathy wasn’t enough. You had to be that person and
know that person’s life and hopes as your own. You had to feel the
desperation of wanting to stay alive.
The book had been more difficult to write than she expected. The
swirl of important ideas and powerful epiphanies seemed dimin­
ished on the page. They became fixed words and were no longer
fresh internal debate. Still, she finished, and was excited and nervous
to see what people would think, how her work might change their
lives. It could have a ripple effect. She did not want to get her expec­
tations up too high, yet writing about personal discovery could prove
to be her calling.
And then she could not find a publisher. She kept sending out the
manuscript and received only rejections or never heard back. It had
been a waste of time to write the damn thing. She was going to throw
it in the trash—it pained her to see it, this big lump of wasted time.
But then she reconsidered. She was stronger than that. It wasn’t a
failure. She simply had not come out of the jungle yet. She needed
perspective. She needed to revise her life before she could revise her
book.
No more excuses about obligations. No more thinking she was in­
dispensable. She bought a ticket for Paris. On the plane, she conju­
gated verbs that would soon have real meaning: Je crie au monde.
J’ai crié au monde. Je crierai pour que le monde m’entende. I will
shout to the world to hear me.
B ENNIE REUNITED with Timothy and their children, the three cats.
He discovered that Timothy had indeed read his mind. It was amazing,
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