[19] The hill I chose to build on
I recently watched a YouTube short of C.S. Lewis talking about stories. He said that all stories are about the same thing: death.
Now, because my attention span is in the toilet between the hours of After Work and Before Dinner, I scrolled past it without a second thought. And then that second thought clawed its way up the U-bend and stumbled into HQ (my cerebrum). Death is terrifying and I keep it far away, but it's still the most real thing to haunt my waking hours. It is sudden and sneaky and cruel, and sometimes kind enough to happen quickly and late in life if you're very lucky.
Death as the reason for all stories sounds silly, because tales are for the living. It how we keep time, preserve culture, freeze battles, and constrain thoughts into lasting displays.
But are stories not what we become when we pass on from this stage?
Stories are a tool. Time capsules that morph with the ages while carrying the foundational truth of human existence: despite our better judgements, bitter regrets, and mediocre efforts, we all die. The only way to hold onto the minds of millions, is to be so unforgivably awful or so inconceivably courageous that others carry superlative versions of you into a future which you cannot dictate nor guide.
Now, I enjoy being right and don't really enjoy thinking about dying. And right now, I'm sitting on an unfamiliar couch in a too-quiet lounge far from home. No cats. No garden. No puppy. No husband. Nothing to love except my own deafening solitude. Nothing to check on except my daily fibre intake. My thoughts are loud, busy picking hills... It's the eve of my flight back home, and I am morbidly fascinated with the expression "the hill you choose to die on" because, in my opinion, death is the only permanent state of being right. While one is alive, silly things like context and nuance and subtleties get in the way of being totally and perfectly correct.
Here, Ursula K Le Guin's words ring true: "What goes too long unchanged destroys itself. The forest is forever because it dies and dies and so lives."
But dying in this egotistical sense isn't the same as nature dying.
I'd rather live and be wrong than die on random hills. So, I've shifted my perspective on this expression a little bit. Instead of dying on a hill, I'd rather build on it. I think it's good to believe in something so strongly that death is an acceptable cost for it, but what good is an uninspiring death?
To that end (which will hopefully happen much later in this life), I'm building chapter after careful chapter into the story of my life, one joy, one kindness, and one gentle word at a time. I may live an ordinary life with ordinary means, but I'll be damned if I don't see the magic in that.
This poem by Laura Foley persuaded my change of heart about what I'm living for and nudged me to consider the stories I will one day become.
We need to separate
to see the life we’ve made,
to leave our house
where someone waits, patiently,
warm beneath the sheets;
to don layers of armor,
sweater, coat, mittens, scarf,
to stride down the frozen road,
putting distance between us,
this cold winter morning,
to look back and see,
on the hilltop, our life,
lit from inside.
I'll be home in 24 hours. I've been counting the days since I arrived three weeks ago. And while my time away was fruitful and flecked with some Big City adventures, I cannot wait to return and keep building on that hill.