Someone close to me has lost her way. I will not name her, nor reveal our relationship, but she feels alone. She finds herself in a great chasm, unaware how the events of her five-decade-plus life have maelstromed to put her there. Seemingly insurmountable walls of solid water surround her, and though she may cry in the dark or cry to others, she does not wipe her tears and try to find a way out. When I told her the water was of her own imagination and would yield to her every whim, she told me the water was her master and she the victim. She believed its walls were solid.
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I, too, spent time in the bottom of a whirlpool. It was a dark time in my life, one of the darkest, where I lived in the land of the dead and found nothing to comfort me but cold statues. The walls closed in and nearly swallowed me, whale-like. I would have been lost forever in the cold and the dark, living as the waking dead.
When I finally did get out, I reeled from my shoreless experience onto a solid floor. I started to try to make sense of my time and came to understand that I share it as a common bond with others. We all dive into the dark waters, we all feel drowned at some point in our lives. Whether it is brought on by a recession or depression, a war, the death of someone you love, a prolonged illness, or a decision of our own making, we all go.
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It's not about going into the dark, into the land of the dead. Sometimes the journey there is so fast it makes your head spin; other times, it is a slow and rocky descent. My own journey was less than half a year, but I was forever changed. This person I know has been in the land of the dead for five years now. To go to the land of the dead, the mythic orchard of white apples, is to be kidnapped away from happiness, like Persephone stolen from her mother, Demeter.
Yet, Persephone became not a victim of death, but a queen of it. She mastered its secrets and learned its lessons, so that she would rise above its coldness and staleness and be its ruler.
I, too, have become Persephone. My time in the land of the dead lends richness and depth to stories, for I must put my characters through their own wrenching journeys. I can't write truthfully if I don't go deep. And I couldn't go deep if I hadn't gone deep in real life.
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But this woman close to me does not see the lessons the land of the dead is trying to teach her. She pays no heed to its secrets and is not mystified by its slow cold fire forging her own character. She hangs her head in shame and looks away. She blames death and how can you blame death? It is the ultimate teacher, is it not? It contains the ultimate lesson - that your time here is limited.
Ah, but what wonders these limited hours have produced! What has been done, from Shakespeare to Mozart to Lincoln to da Vinci to Newton to everyone in between. The limiting time freed these people to do what they were born to do, rather than cower in fear and curse the land of the dead.
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What the land of the dead taught me, more than any other lesson, was that - I ALWAYS HAVE THE CHOICE. The choice of what, you say? The choice of how to use my living hours. What shall I do today? How can I peel the fake wallpaper of this false house and get to the bones of living underneath? For that is the test. To be alive. And, to choose how I see life. I can cower in fear, I can blame, I can shout at the watery walls of my prison until my lungs give out. But will I be happy? Will I get anywhere? Will I have anything to show for it at my own funeral? No.
I wish I could show this woman my lesson learned, but I can't make anyone see what I've seen or know what I know. I know because I've been there. She is still in the land of the dead, and I reach out a hand to help or a word to guide, but to no avail.
And so, she will stay there for as long as the king and queen see fit. Because you do not escape without resolving to learn from it first. To learn from death is the most powerful lesson there is.
Those who have learned wisely enjoy the remainder of their lives deeply immersed in what is truly important - love, creativity, family, generosity, character virtues. Those who have not learned wisely can be easily seen in their elder years as bitter, angry, resentful, controlling, cold, selfish, spoiling others' dreams and aspirations. As their time of death draws nearer, they display more and more of their character.
The land of the dead doesn't care whether I live life happily or not. It only applies the lesson, and it was up to me to find the moral. I found it. I live it.
If only this person, this lost soul, close to me could find a positive moral learned and not cry out as a victim of her own choices. She has the choice, the same as I do. She is endowed with the rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, and she is granted free will. Those are powerful gifts, dear soul.
Remember them, for they will guide you. I wait on the other side, staring across the misty river. I wait for you, but I can't wait forever.
My time is limited.
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