SHORT STORY
Fable
Short, but not a story
Our story follows a small man with big ambitions, who can’t help but see the possibilities ahead of him, whether they’re there or not.
He would like to call himself an optimist, and he cares not for the confusions of others who he feels are unaware of his tendencies for greatness and his incomparable intelligence.
This fact would come to define his actions.
And this fact would come to change.
The causes of that change are unknown, private to himself, or yet to happen.
Though one event is known, and follows, though it can’t with unquestioned certainty be considered a cause.
Regardless.
He once came across a fable, which spoke of a girl so transfixed by the world in her naiveté that she would go harvesting experiences in order to trade them with others for their attention and approval.
She could not do a single action without considering the value of doing so measured in the attention it would gain her upon its retelling.
She would occasionally even construct scenarios she thought valuable with all the pretence of candid spontaneity.
The fable would go on to speak of the girl, now an older woman, lost in the woods seeking more experiences to give to others, but finding less value in anything she found and growing weary and ever more lost with each new endeavour.
There were other valuable things in the woods, but her focus had been so specifically measured for so long a time that she had the greatest difficulty in seeing them.
She had become aware of her predicament in her older age, and of the pathological nature of her striving, but try as she might she was unable to pull herself away from her search.
Not to say that she did not have the ability.
That all was possible, and there were many valuable things to be found that she would have found even more rewarding than the trinkets of attention she had gained, but she could not pull herself away for the fear of not knowing.
She would not know where to start looking, or what to look for, or for how long she would have to look, or whether her search would be successful, or how much attention she would gain from what she found.
But, of course, therein lay her problem:
She could not see that the point of a change in her searching was not to find new things, but to find new reasons for searching.
The man, now many times over in age had since learned many things.
Many things he learned he learned by his own mistakes; he was always doomed to repeat a history he had never had.
Whatever mistakes he had made, his mistakes could not be measured. Nor could he measure the impact that such a fable had had on his life.
He, like the woman, could not know the alternative of not knowing.
Though he knew one thing:
He had never and would never make the mistakes the woman had made — to fail to choose otherwise, to fail to risk unknowing, to fail to see intrinsic ends, to fail to fail where it mattered, to fail to risk failing at all.
At least he tried.
Though what he had read in that fable and other pages was nothing in value compared to the experiences he had had.
Even those filled with great terror and hardship; the loses he’d endured in love and friendship; the sacrifices he had had to make; the pain he inflicted willingly in protection and unwillingly in negligence.
All such things had made for the adventure he was happy to call his life.
In fact, he often felt that these struggles, that the times he was brought close to death, the times where he was forced into a state of survival, were the more interesting, valuable, memorable and meaningful times of his adventure.
Many of these times he had endured alone, either by choice or by consequence, but by which he could not always know.
But the accompanying aloneness had in part made for their memorable character.
Because what he discovered in those times alone was the importance and value of being accompanied by his own thoughts, and their subsequent dissipation.
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