I looked at the deserted city of Foncebadon. Maybe all of those people, collectively, had felt the need for a change. I asked whether Petrus had chosen this place purposely in order to say all of this to me.
"I don't know what happened here," he answered. "Often people have to accept the changes that destiny forces upon them, but that's not what I'm talking about. I am speaking of an act of will, a concrete desire to do battle against everything that is unsatisfying in one's everyday life.
"On the road of our lives, we always run into problems that are hard to solve--like, for example, passing through a waterfall without letting it make us fall. So you have to allow the Creative Imagination to do its work. In your case, the waterfall was a life-and-death situation, and there wasn't time to consider many options; agape showed you the only way.
"But there are problems in our lives that require us to choose between one way and another. Everyday problems, like a business decision, the breakup of a relationship, a social obligation. Each of these small decisions we have to make, throughout our lives, might represent a choice between life and death. When you leave the house in the morning on your way to work, you might choose one means of transportation that will drop you off safe and sound or another that is going to crash and kill its passengers. This is a radical example of how a simple decision may affect us for the rest of our lives."
I began to think about myself as Petrus spoke. I had chosen to walk the Road to Santiago in search of my sword. It was the sword that was most important to me now, and I needed somehow to find it. I had to make the right decision.
"The only way to make the right decision is to know what the wrong decision is," he said after I had mentioned my concern. "Y
ou have to examine the other path, without fear and without being morbid, and then decide."
It was then that Petrus taught me the Shadows Exercise.
"Your problem is your sword," he said after he had explained the exercise.
I agreed.
The Shadows Exercise
Relax completely.
For five minutes, study the shadows of all of the objects and people around you. Try to identify exactly which part of the object or person is casting a shadow.
For the next five minutes, continue to do this, but at the same time, focus on the problem you are trying to solve. Look for all of the possible wrong solutions to the problem.
Finally, spend five more minutes studying the shadows and thinking about what correct solutions remain. Eliminate them, one by one, until only the single correct solution is left.
"So do the exercise now. I'm going to take a walk. When I come back, I know that you will have the right solution."
I remembered how much of a hurry Petrus had been in during the past few days, yet now we were having a prolonged conversation in this abandoned city. It seemed to me that he was trying to gain some time so that he, too, could make a decision regarding something. This made me excited, and I began to do the exercise.
I did a bit of RAM breathing to put me in harmony with my surroundings. Then I noted on my watch when fifteen minutes would have passed, and I began to look at the shadows all around me--shadows of ruined houses, stones, wood, and the cross behind me. As I studied the shadows, I saw that it was difficult to know exactly what part was casting any given shadow. I had never noticed this before. Some house beams that were straight were transformed into shadows with sharp angles, and an irregular stone cast a shadow with a smoothly rounded form. I did this for ten minutes. The exercise was so fascinating that it was not difficult to concentrate on it. Then I began to think of the wrong solutions to the problem of finding my sword. Many ideas came to mind--I thought about taking a bus to Santiago, and then I thought about phoning my wife and using some sort of emotional trickery to find out where she had placed it.
When Petrus returned, I was smiling.
"So?" he asked.
"I found out how Agatha Christie wrote her mystery novels," I joked. "She transformed the hunch that was most wrong into the one that was correct. She must have known about the Exercise of the Shadows."
Petrus asked where my sword was.
"First I'm going to tell you the most erroneous guess that I came up with as I looked at the shadows: that the sword is somewhere other than on the Road to Santiago."
"You are a genius. You figured out that we have been walking all this way in order to find your sword. I thought they had told you that already in Brazil."
"It's being kept in a safe place that my wife could not enter," I continued. "I deduced that it's in an absolutely open place but that it has been assimilated so well into its surroundings that it can't be seen."
This time Petrus didn't smile. I went on:
"And since the most absurd thing would be that it is in a place where there are lots of people, it has to be in some locale that is practically deserted. And most important, and so that the few people who see it don't notice the difference between it and a typical Spanish sword, it must be in a place where no one knows how to distinguish between styles of swords."
"Do you think it is here?" he asked.
"No, it's not here. The thing that would be most wrong would be to do this exercise at the place where my sword is. I discarded that hunch right away. It must be in a city that is similar to this one, but it cannot be in an abandoned city, because a sword in an abandoned city would attract a lot of attention from pilgrims and passersby. It would wind up as a decoration on the wall of a bar."
"Very good," he said, and I could see that he was proud of me--or of the exercise he had taught me.