The Narrow Road

There is a time in every man’s life when he is beaten. He is beaten, he has been battered, he has been thrown from the comfortable path he knew to the suffering he did not expect. You may think you know suffering; you may even think you know hardship – but you will truly feel that you had not known those things when you come to this point in the road. You would trade the new suffering for tenfold pain, if only it were on the old path, if only you still felt like the way forward was at least familiar. But no, that is what makes this pain so much harder, and so alien. You have been called into the Wilderness. You have been called to wander. You have been called to Trust.

We have but one life. There are many moments, but one finite capsule of existence in this plane. Behind us lies the past, an ash heap of memories and regrets. In front of us lies the future, the kindling for the fire. But here you are and here you burn, in this moment – the present. Here you will always be. You see the ash and you see the kindling and you know that you have been one and will become the other. But you will never truly be in those places because you are THE FLAME. Engulfed in the all-consuming present you rage like a funeral pyre for what lies behind and as a burnt offering for what is to come. So, burn. Consume what is placed upon the hearth! Burn brightly and let the black smoke billow for the dead – the moments gone by. Burn brightly and stretch your flames to the heavens in an outpouring of gratitude for the gifts to come. Burn brightly because it is the only thing you truly can do.

Man only tortures himself by thinking too much. The regrets are not too great, the anxiety is not too much. The only thing that this can secure for you is the sickening realization that after a life of fear you may finally think to yourself not that the critical mind created safety, but that it prevented you from ever truly being alive. Your regrets of times you were wrong, time that you wasted. Your anxiety of time to come, and fear of the challenges they would bring. All these things only amounted to a single end: the burning of your most precious and fleeting resource, time. Which fate seems worse? The paralyzing feeling of regret, wistfulness, and anxiety today, or the soul crushing realization that time is over, and you wasted it? The feeling that there is not even anymore anxiety to be had? It is done, and you didn’t do all that you could do, not even close. Clearly the latter is the worst of all fates for the mind. However, there is no choice to be made between these two feelings. Because it is the first that leads to the latter. If you allow the first to dominate you, do not be surprised when you one day find yourself out of time and even out of anxiety. Don’t be surprised when you can no longer numb yourself with the fear of a distant regret. A distant regret or anxiety you can cover yourself in as a shield from reality. A luxury that you only had when you knew there was still time. Because one day, there will not be any more time. Your youth will be gone, your potential will be gone, the seeds you meant to plant will never have grown. You will not even have your comfortable and distant anxiety or regret. You will only have the true feeling of regret from life wasted.

Hell is real. Hell is very real, and it is a fire too. One that will consume you and burn you for all eternity. There is a reason why satan is called the deceiver, or the accuser. One of the hallmarks of moving forward from our wrongdoing is the guilt. We know we are so small and foolish. So foolish to be tricked, to be so overcome with our own zealous glorification that we tread upon ground that we should not have. Once we escape our passion, our ego, and our defenses from reality we plummet back towards the meekness to which we are called. The chorus echoes in our mind, “how could you do that?” The accuser doesn’t even mind if we stop the action of a certain evil – because he is confident in his ability to make us choose the ruin of our own souls in our minds. It is not enough to do no evil in this world, because you too are a part of this world. Congratulate your virtue in abstinence from a certain action you know to be wrong. Your self-praise condemns you to ruin.  Your self-praise has changed your noble action to a ritual of resentment. What more is there?

If you choose virtue as a means to laud your virtue, you have accepted a role of magistrate that you will never fill. Now you must litigate yourself and your past for the fleeting feeling of superiority you have come to associate with virtue. The throne onto which you have placed yourself. The future becomes increasingly petrifying as your inadequacies pile up in front of the voracious and ceaseless machine of accusation and deception that you let in. It chips away and chips away at everything around you. Your present is a fragment surrounding you in the rubble of time. You break everything around you to make yourself safe. The action of breaking and critiquing was enough to satisfy you. But now, you’ve run out of targets. You’re left in a barren desert of your own choosing. That is when it hits you – this isn’t what you wanted. How much did you destroy to get here? Did you destroy everything? It’s over.

Darkness, but not for long. Because this doesn’t have to be the end. The final deception would be to keep your eyes closed and listen to the voice that tells you that this is the end. Open your eyes, emerge from the smoldering coals sinking into that cold, grey death of ashes. There is fuel upon the hearth! There is time! Realize that you never supplied your own fuel for the fire. It was always placed there for you, and it will be until it is not! And one day there will be no more fire to be had, and there will be the smolder of greying coals, but it is not today. If you choose to burn out when there is still fresh wood to burn, you waste the only thing you ever had in your folly. You deny the glory to the one who puts wood on the fire, and the one who cuts and splits the wood. You sin twice, against yourself and your maker.

So, seize upon all that may burn. All your strength, all your pain, all your love. Cling to the fresh wood so that the flames climb higher. Fire burns indiscriminately, as do you. Do not separate yourself from the fuel that is being thrust upon you from a place well above. Consume that which sustains you! You do not live for yourself. When you do this, you are the magistrate.  You apply the lens of certainty into the mysteries of life. You rob your future to satisfy your past. You destroy the immense potential of which you cannot fathom for the comfort of a bed to die in. The worst of this is that you know what you have done, and you can’t stop because you are so far down the path.

But all things can be made for good, even you and your ways. Accept that this is the moment that you were waiting for. This is the moment that your life changed. You didn’t change with the exultant splendor of the glorious magistrate by judging a way forward through supreme darkness. Quite the opposite; you accepted that you are not the super-man. You do not even have the power to save yourself. Everything you have was not hard-fought and won on your virtue and glory. You burn the wood that is supplied for you. Now you may begin to truly step into glory as yourself. The path you lamented leaving still beckons with his comfortable deceptions, but there is no going back. To look back is death and for the first time you have truly chosen life.