Evan Balster

You set out long ago to climb a tall mountain and build your home atop it. As you’ve made your way up its side the peak has seemed to stretch ever away from you; at times you’ve reached what you thought was the top but saw a ridge stretching away to an even higher peak.

While your final destination seems no nearer than it did at the outset of your journey, you look back and can see you’ve come a long way. The view from where you are is already more spectacular than you could ever have imagined. But you press on.

You could stop now and build your home. Really, it’s all you’ve wanted all along, and it would have been an easy decision had you made it before setting out on this journey. Building a home here wouldn’t stop you from setting out to visit higher ground as you pleased. But the path stretching behind you is long and arduous. Footprints in the snow tell you there have been those who went further. You worked hard to get this far; harder than you have for anything else in your life. Settling for anything less than the peak would throw all that away.

What I’m expressing here is a thinly veiled analogy about how people can decide what they want or decide outright to be content with themselves. The fear of that comes from the idea that the drive to pursue one’s ambitions will disappear with the decision to “just be happy” is made, but increasingly I don’t suspect that to be the case.

These mountains make their share of wise men, but I suspect they’ll be found along the way. The man who has found his way to the top expecting to be fulfilled — he is still lost.

I’ve just redone my homepage.  I still don’t use it for very much, but it might grow more useful in time.

This isn’t much of a musing as it’s meant to plug up what would otherwise be empty space, but I’ll have things to say soon enough.