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"Now, each of you should pick up whichever bundle he pleases." We might suspect that the fakir quickly picked up someone else's bundle. No, he did not make such a mistake. In panic, he ran to pick up his own bundle before anyone else could reach it -- otherwise, it could have become a problem for him, because all the bundles looked the same. He thought it was better to have his own bundle -- at least the miseries in it were familiar. Who knows what kinds of miseries were contained in the other peoples' bundles? Familiar misery is still a lesser kind of misery -- it is a known misery, a recognizable misery.
So, in a state of panic, he ran and retrieved his own bundle before anyone else could lay his hands on it. When he looked around, however, he found that everyone else had also run and picked up their own bundles; no one had selected a bundle that was not his own. He asked, "Why are you in such a hurry to collect your own bundles?"
"We became frightened. Up to now we'd believed that everyone else was happy, that only we were miserable," they replied.
In that mansion, whomsoever the fakir asked, the reply was that they'd always believed everyone else was happy. "We even believed that you were happy too. You also walked down the street with a smile on your face. We never imagined that you carried a bundle of miseries inside you too," they said.
With curiosity, the fakir asked, "Why did you collect your own bundle? Why didn't you exchange it for another?"
They said, "Today, each of us had prayed to God, saying we wanted to exchange our bundles of misery. But when we saw that everyone's miseries were just the same, we became scared; we had never imagined such a thing. So we figured it was better to pick up our own bundle. It is familiar and known. Why fall into new miseries? By and by, we get used to the old miseries too."
That night, nobody picked up a bundle that belonged to someone else. The fakir woke up, thanked merciful God for letting him have his own miseries back. And decided never to make such a prayer again.
In fact, the arithmetic behind it is the same. When we look at other people's faces and at our own
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