Why do we want to be unique?
It is a human need to desire and to believe that she is unique. She wants to know that she is one of a kind, that she is special, and there is nobody else in the world that is just like her.
It isn’t just pride that compels her to desire this. It isn’t just a competitive spirit. It isn’t just honor nor worldly profit that she seeks.
She wants to be unique because she doesn’t want to be disposable. She doesn’t want to be disposable because she wants to be loved.
But why? Can we not love someone that is just like everybody else?
We cannot.
We could not.
The fact that we are able to love something makes it more special than anything else.
The little prince went away,
to look again at the roses.
“You are not at all like my rose,” he said.
“As yet you are nothing.
No one has tamed you, and you have tamed no one.
You are like my fox when I first knew him.
He was only a fox
like a hundred thousand other foxes.
But I have made a friend,
and now he is unique in all the world.”
And the roses were very much embarrassed.
“You are beautiful, but you are empty,” he went on.
“One could not die for you.
To be sure, an ordinary passerby would think
that my rose looked just like you
–the rose that belongs to me.
But in herself alone she is more important
than all the hundreds of you
other roses: because it is she that I have watered;
because it is she
that I have put under the glass globe;
because it is for her
that I have killed the caterpillars
(except the two or three we saved
to become butterflies);
because it is she that I have listened to,
when she grumbled,
or boasted,
or even sometimes when she said nothing.
Because she is MY rose.”
–THE LITTLE PRINCE, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
The thing about hope is that it’s a positive force that shines the most when it’s dark. When everything’s going well, we hardly notice it’s there. But when things go against us, when our dreams fade and when we see no immediate reprieve from our troubles, that’s when hope does its best work for us.
"Where Hope Can Be Found"