One day a friend said to her, “How did you manage in Italy? If you had gone to a city, people would have spoken English. But in an Italian village they don’t speak English. Did you have any difficulty with the language?”
The lady said, “No, I didn’t have any difficulty. Before I went, I took lessons for three weeks and I knew Italian quite well.”
The friend said, “It took you only three weeks? I have been studying Italian for seven years, and still I have not learnt it. What can you do? God gave some people brains and other people no brains. It is all God’s fault. That means they didn’t have any difficulty in understanding you.”
The lady said, “No, I didn’t say that. I didn’t have any difficulty in talking to them in Italian, but they were the ones who had difficulty. I talked to them in Italian fluently, but they didn’t understand me. It was their difficulty, not my difficulty. I didn’t have any difficulty in speaking Italian.
“One day I went to a small restaurant for breakfast and, in perfect Italian, I asked the waiter to give me a mushroom omelette. It was a sunny day, and I was sitting outside. Instead of bringing me a mushroom omelette, he brought me an onion omelette. I asked him why he brought me an onion omelette when I asked for a mushroom omelette, but he didn’t understand me. Since he didn’t understand me, I drew a very nice mushroom.
“So he said, ‘I am extremely sorry,’ and he went inside and brought out an umbrella. He started begging me for forgiveness because I had been in the sun for an hour. I drew a mushroom and he took it as an umbrella. What could I do? So I paid for the onion omelette, and I gave him a tip also because he was standing there with the umbrella. He was very happy to get the tip for providing me with shelter. ”From:Sri Chinmoy,The mushroom and the umbrella, Agni Press, 1981
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