What Do You Tell a Son

A young shepherd boy in his early teens ran up a very high mountain on self exile. He sought to escape being punished for some mishap and ridiculed for his natural incapacities. He founded a self sustaining primitive village up on the mountain top and aimed to avenge the injustice he perceived he had suffered. The rarity in this completely isolated, hidden mountain top community and the circumstances that accommodate its continued existence gave their inherited rash quest to be forcibly acknowledged a strange familiarity. The struggles of a young maiden in these circumstances despite her popular natural good looks, made her appreciate that physical attributes doesn't speak best of all. This very distant descendant of the founding father of the mountain top village had set about imparting this and other laudable lessons to her son. Her recounted tale of a journey through time and it myth, relating with people that constitute the wholesome story of the entire region, brought her face to face with the same experiences she only heard of in tales. She encounters the difference in diverse people and their clashing believes. She learns dominance is allowed and influence deliberate, and growth flourishes only in hospitable settings. Her narration proves literacy comes with harsh discernment and this can subsequently hurt, making a simple favour cruel, good food poisonous and culture archaically crude in its nature. The intricacies of faith emerges from her experiences as she discovers that the blindness strict diligence to faiths produces, only spawns selfishness and not civility. Religion prospers when it is unflinching and sure. She sees life thriving on relationships and how wealth, health and peace spell dominance, and are the faces of the war that ensued on the lands beneath her mountain top village. Her situation highlights that she is wrong to expect anything in life and right to expect anything too. This is because people will only strife for their own good always and can be unfair if it doesn't concern them. People struggle over trivial issues they never ever fully accomplish and this continues as the sun declares hope is about yet again, as it rotates every single short night away. She saw life as a promise, a loan and the meaning for it. Life is announced and recede back into the void it emerged from when the loan is paid, to the abyss it returns to, to reconcile with the good and evil it daily speculates with. She learnt evil would be punished, no matter how long it takes and nothing is truly free, since nothing goes for nothing. Everything must always be purchased and bought. Someone pays a price, tangible or not, knowingly or otherwise. Not even freedom is completely free. And finally, not all things noble are sensible or every sacrifice reasonable to all. The choices and options not made or picked, are missed out forever.