When the people saw that the woman was returning to her land, they asked what she had said to the king.
"She reminded us of what we had forgotten," said one of the king's scholars, "that we are but travelers through an ephemeral landscape, and that on a journey through a desert, we should not expect to find happiness from fingering the grains of sand in the dunes. We find happiness by finding our way home."
The Day Creativity Met the Linear Dragon
It was a winter's rainy day when the new Vice President for Design Concepts (who had just been promoted from Senior Accountant because he could calculate to the nearest nickel how much a new car would cost to build) noticed that two of his employees, a young man and a young woman, were not at their desks. Upon inquiring, he was told that they had "gone to the loft to be creative." The Vice President (who could remember the part number of every component he had ever touched) calmly adjusted his bow tie, cleared his throat, checked to see that his shoelaces were still tied, and then strode briskly down the long corridor of the half-remodeled automobile factory. Soon he was walking up the stairs to the loft, only to arrive at a door marked, "Do Not Disturb."
Viewing the sign as an affront to his authority, he applied Chapter Two of the assertiveness training book he had just finished and quickly opened the door with determination and a scowl.
What he saw was not what he expected. Near the door was a boom box, playing very lively but not overly loud classical music. Directly in front of him across the room he saw the young woman, barefoot and wearing, instead of her business attire, purple sweatpants and a torn green sweatshirt. Worse than this, she was turning cartwheels and saying what sounded to him like, "Put it in the lake, dip it, water proof it, French dip it, soak it, drench it, pinch it, wrench it." When she stopped to attend to his interruption, he noticed that her hair was rubber banded into a vertical column on top of her head.
The young man was sitting off to one side, wearing jeans and a T-shirt printed with the words, "None of the Above." Nearby was an open ream of copier paper, many sheets of which he had evidently wrinkled up into a ball and tossed at a trash can a few feet away, with highly indifferent accuracy. A few of the sheets had been written on with multicolored felt-tip pens and placed carelessly in several piles.
"What's going on here?" demanded the Vice President.
"We work here," said the young man.
"Not any more you don't," said the Vice President sternly. "Just what do you think you're doing, anyway?"