Quivering Leaf

"Que lejos estoy del cielo donde he nacido. Inmensa nostalgia invade mi pensamiento. Ahora que estoy tan solo y triste cual hoja al viento, quisiera llorar, quisiera reir de sentimiento."

We did not speak for a long while. He finally broke the silence.
"Since the day you were born, one way or another, someone has been doing something to you," he said.
"That's correct," I said.
"And they have been doing something to you against your will."
"True."
"And by now you're helpless, like a leaf in the wind."
"That's correct. That's the way it is."
I said that the circumstances of my life had sometimes been devastating. He listened attentively but I could not figure out if he was being agreeable or genuinely concerned until I noticed that he was trying to hide a smile.
"No matter how much you feel sorry for yourself, you have to change that," he said in a soft tone. "It doesn't jibe with the life of a warrior."
He laughed and sang the song again but contorted the intonations of certain words; the result was a ludicrous lament. He pointed out that the reason I had liked the song was because in my own life I had done nothing but find flaws with everything and lament. I could not argue with him. He was correct. Yet I believed that I had sufficient reasons to justify my feeling of being like a leaf in the wind.
"The hardest thing in the world is to assume the mood of a warrior," he said. "It is of no use to be sad and complain and feel justified in doing so, believing that someone is always doing something to us. Nobody is doing anything to anybody, much less to a warrior."
"You are here, with me, because you want to be here. You should have assumed full resposibility by now, so the idea that you are at the mercy of the wind would be inadmissable."
"Self-pity doesn't jibe with power," he said. "The mood of a warrior calls for control over himself and at the same time it calls for abandoning himself."
"How can that be?" I asked. "How can he control and abandon himself at the same time?"
"It is a difficult technique," he said.