Back in November 1922, Albert Einstein was traveling from Europe to Japan. He was offered a chance to give a lecture series in Japan and was being paid about 2,000 pounds for his work and travels. So he went.
Einstein, who was only 43-years-old at that time, had already won his field’s highest prize. He recently had been awarded the Noble Prize in physics. So he was a bit of a big deal, and news of his arrival in Japan spread pretty fast. Thousand of people gathered around him, when he arrived. Thankfully, he had a nice, secluded room at the Imperial Hotel in Tokyo, and one night, he ordered room service.
When the young bellhop arrived with his meal, Einstein either didn’t have any money for a tip or, the messenger refused the tip, which was customary for Japan.
So Einstein wrote two notes for him, in German, and on the hotel’s stationery.
The first said: “A calm and modest life brings more happiness than the pursuit of success combined with constant restlessness.”
The second said, “Where there’s a will, there’s a way.”
The kid kept those notes, obviously. And I’m not sure who owned those Einstein reflections in 2017, but it was on this date that year, when those two items were sold in an auction. The first note went for $1.56 million, and the second went for $240,000.
I bet Albert never imagined. He was probably just trying to be nice to the kid who brought him a hamburger. But his advice seems pretty good to me. It seems that our world is pretty full of people concerned with the pursuit of success, which results in the affliction of constant restlessness.
A lot of other big things happened on this date throughout history. The first U.S. patent was issued for the phosphorus friction match in 1836. Harry Houdini gave his last performance in 1926. And gangster Al Capone was sentenced to 11 years in prison for tax evasion in 1931. Among others, this biggie, the Charter of the United Nations, was born in 1945.
But back in 1881, something happened, and I guess I never quite realized the logistics of this. Levi P. Morton, the U.S. ambassador to France, drove in the first rivet in the Statue of Liberty. Over there in France, when that statue was first being built.
But the way it started was with the design work of French sculptor Frédéric Bartholdi. Once the artistic drawings were complete, the construction began in 1870, with our good man Gustave Eiffel. He did the designing and building of the interior metal framework. The entire statue was completed in France. She stood somewhere over there, tall and proud, before being disassembled and shipped to America in 1885. I never realized the “length” of the project. Not her actual height, which is 305 feet, but the length in years.
And then? Did she come over in little pieces in a bunch of boxes? Or in big chunks on the deck of some ship? I don’t know. But once she docked, the statue was reassembled on what was then called Bedloe Island. Now we know it as Liberty Island, there in New York Harbor. The Statue of Liberty was dedicated by President Grover Cleveland in 1886.
We know what it says on her base. “Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free.” And on.
We have long seen this as a symbol welcoming others to the freedoms of America. Yet, I think today, many of the current U.S. citizens are the huddled masses, yearning to breathe free.
Looking at both of these stories, I am reminded that life is full of direction. The Universe is full of advice. Blueprints taped to statues, and little notes that come to us on the seventh floor of some hotel in Tokyo. It is true. This place is constantly giving us little cues and tiny nudges, pointing us on our path. We just have to keep our eyes open enough to see them, or our bodies quiet enough, to feel them. And that is the trick to all of this, I think.
And with that, I’ll stop talking now.
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“The absence of a message sometimes is a presence of one.”
― Hasse Jerner
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“It is a mistake to think that moving fast is the same as actually going somewhere.”
― Steve Goodier
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“I go to seek a Great Perhaps.”
― François Rabelais
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Einstein, and a big green woman, pointing this way. Or that.
