A long time gone

He talked to her of the great waste of years between then and now. A long time gone. And it was pointless, he said, to think how those years could have been put to better use, for he could hardly have put them to worse. There was no recovering them now. You could grieve endlessly for the loss of time and for the damage done therein. For the dead, and for your own lost self. But what the wisdom of the ages says is that we do well not to grieve on and on. And those old ones knew a thing or two and had some truth to tell, Inman said, for you can grieve your heart out and in the end you are still where you were. All your grief hasn't changed a thing. What you have lost will not be returned to you. It will always be lost. You're left only with your scars to mark the void. All you can choose is to go on or not. But if you go on, it's knowing you carry your scars with you. 

~ Cold Mountain, by Charles Frazier

The Answer

All the world's a stage, 
And all the men and women merely players;
They have their exits and their entrances,
And one man in his time plays many parts, 
His acts being seven ages.

William Shakespeare, As You Like It.

I find myself having the very good fortune to be in  Europe, where the myths and stories of the ages are painted, carved and writ large on the buildings and in the very streets in which I am walking. Story is every where here, and the same stories repeat themselves, over and over, through the centuries. The stories of many, repeating again and again through the seven ages of humankind, spun as if by the hands of the Fates themselves.

They are stories of victory and of loss, of love and loneliness, of joy and anguish. From the triumphant splendour of Parisian monuments, to the unspent anguish that bathes the daisy-spotted countryside where the bones of the war-dead lie eloquent in their massed silence, these stories weave and breathe everywhere, a constant reminder of the turning of the wheel of fortune in the life of every man.

And the wheel turns, always, and for all. When confronted with difficult times, the well-meaning are wont to soothe with platitudes such as 'we are never given more than we can bear'. This is not true. Life, in all its brilliance of colour and tone, hands many people more than can be borne. The weight of these things can break a person, or crush them completely. This is never a reflection on that person, their strength or worthiness, only a reminder that all humans, by virtue of the fraility of our own flesh, are vulnerable to the tide of fortune that washes around us, constant, inexorable, infinite.

When faced with what is difficult, do what you need to. Adjust what needs to be adjusted, even if it's the very direction of the course of your life. What matters is you, your wholeness and wellbeing. Live as honestly and as well as you can, hold yourself to your own standards, and forgive yourself your failings when they arise despite your best efforts. Never apologise when life hands you a heavy load. Be a good human being to other human beings. Be kind. Honour the light in yourself, and the light you find in other people. Know yourself, know your story, and tell your story. Weave it through your life, in the words that you speak and the actions you take, and in your art and your writing, so that it becomes the strong fabric that holds the stars in your own night sky, a map made of light to lead you in your own darkest hour, or even a beacon of hope for someone else who has become lost along their own dimmed path.

This is what the very best of our protagonists, characters and personae dramatis do. They live once, in their actions, and again in their moment of realisation, the finding of their own strength, wisdom or genius. By finding the answer to their deepest question within their own story, they become awakened, whole, real. The story becomes alive. It breathes, stretches, steps off the page and into the streets and towns and the very lives of humanity.