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Thank you! Good evening! When I was a child, I used to play in the
sandbox with my brother Andrew. I have 7 brothers and Andrew is the brother immediately older
than me. And for a few years, we played together happily. My mother used to come out in the
morning and draw a line down the middle of the sandbox. One half for Andrew, one half
for Matthew. And like I said, for a couple of years we played together happily, until
one day Andrew decided that he wanted to be a property developer and that he needed a
little bit of extra land for his property development.
And this was back in the late 70's. Back in the late 70's, Andrew was obviously already
a man before his time, because he was already practicing business in a way that really only
became popular here in America in the 90's. He took his shovel and he hit me over the
head with it, you know? I went inside, screaming and crying and he had the extra land he needed.
When I got inside, I sat in the middle of the kitchen floor, screaming and crying, thinking,
hoping, believing that my mother would come and deliver some justice to this obvious situation
of injustice. But no sign of my mother. So I screamed and cried a little bit louder and
still no sign of my mother. So finally I stopped screaming and crying and now I could hear
my mother whistling to herself upstairs - say a ritual she used to practice when she was
cleaning the house. And I knew she could hear me screaming and crying and I knew she was
ignoring me. And a great anger began to build up in me.
And then, all of a sudden, a moment of inspiration: it occurred to me that on Thursday afternoons,
my mother used to take my brothers and I grocery shopping. All of us. And if we were good boys
when my mother was doing the grocery shopping, if we were good boys - which we always were
- at the end of the shopping expedition, my mother used to buy us a small chocolate, maybe
in the shape of a truck or a plane or a car or a bus, wrapped in aluminum foil. I really
like chocolate, so I used to eat my chocolate on my way from the store. But my brother Andrew,
he likes to collect things. He always has. And sitting in the middle of the kitchen floor,
it occurred to me that Andrew's chocolate collection had grown so vast that my mother
had emptied the entire bottom shelf of the refrigerator to house Andrew's chocolate collection,
to protect Andrew's chocolate collection from the warm Australian climate. And Andrew - well
Andrew was in the sandbox. And my mother - she was upstairs and she obviously wasn't coming
downstairs until she would finish whatever she was doing. So I walked over the refrigerator
and I opened the refrigerator door. And there they were. As family legend would have it,
there were 147 chocolates in Andrew's collection that morning.
I didn't eat the chocolates... straight away. First, I just took them all out of the refrigerator
and I neatly arranged them in the middle of the kitchen floor. I had rows of trucks and
buses and parking garages and airports. And then, one by one, I began to devour Andrew's
chocolate collection. About a half an hour later, my mother came downstairs and - as
the family legend would have it - I was devouring the 47th chocolate when she walked in the
kitchen. She looked at me, I looked at her, she screamed at the top of her voice: "What
are you doing? What are you doing?" And you know? I've got to believe that God
would like to say that to us sometimes. I've got to believe that God would like to march
straight into our lives and say: "What are you doing?" I like to imagine him say: "I've
given you life, I've offered you with so many gifts and so many blessings, put you in the
midst of abundance. What are you doing?" And it's this search and it's this struggle
in the midst of all these blessings that we find ourselves that we call life, that we
call the quest of life, the journey of the soul. And in the midst of all of that, each
and every single one of us is searching for one thing; all of us, without exception. We
want to be happy. You want to be happy, I want to be happy. The human heart is on a
quest for happiness. The human heart is on a quest for happiness. We have this great
desire for happiness and we live out of this desire. We live out of this desire.
Now I don't know if you've noticed, but from time to time, people do stupid things. Have
you noticed? From time to time, people do do stupid things. And we maybe scratch our
heads, maybe it's our parents or maybe it's our children, maybe it's our friends at school,
maybe it's our colleagues at works. Maybe it's our boss, maybe it's our employees. From
time to time, people do do stupid things. And we watch people do stupid things. We ask
ourselves: "Why would anybody ever do something so stupid?" We ask ourselves: "Don't they
know that's going to make them miserable?" We ask ourselves: "Why would anybody do something
so stupid?" The answer? People do stupid things because they believe those stupid things will
bring them happiness.