xxroninxx

It's storytime. Everyone grab your blanky, have a cookie (two per person damn it) and gather round. Who likes Parables? Only two of you? Then to the rest of ya, the parable of reading this parable is "life's unfair". Ok, let's get started.

And if anyone has to use the restroom. Hold it.


Brilliance

The sun had just begun to sweep its familiar and timeless warmth across an old path one morning when a man walking down it found himself caught pleasurably in the midst of that ritual. Its early rays seemed to swell an almost primitive sense of joy in him and, though he knew already what kinds of tribulations awaited him that day in his life, he felt more ready to take them on. Which is probably why on one conscious level or another he decided to take this old path in the first place. Few people, if anyone, ever used it anymore. There were newer, arguably better ways to get where one might need to be getting after all, as his wife and family would constantly remind him. Ways that would, if nothing else, keep him from being late so often. But the man enjoyed the path all the same and the various qualities that it held and brought out for both of them.
It was as the man was walking across a noticeably open portion of the trail (his favorite part, in fact. The horizon seemed to extend further back without any interruption than it could anywhere else in the world and nowhere else in life did clarity ever feel so tangible to him) that in the corner of his eye he saw a small glint from the ground. It should be clarified that while it was small in size, this glint was the most brilliant flash the mans eyes had ever seen. So brilliant that even though he wasnt sure he saw anything at all, it made him stop where he was and wonder what it could have been, what it might mean, and why his mind was dizzying with ideas and possibilities. It was a mere particle of a second and yet the man felt somehow affected by just the thought that such a brilliant kind of thing should even possibly exist! He was immediately captivated and fell to his knees trying to get a better concept of where it came from.
His head twist and turned frantically as he tried to desperately find what the glint must have been but was unsuccessful in seeing anything. With a heavy sigh he started to get back up to his feet, giving a small, disappointed chuckle. He walked a few steps forward trying to dismiss it was anything and concentrate instead on that he was going to be quite late again to where he needed to be. But his mind was in a state of torture unknown to him before this moment and it felt simultaneously restlessOh! How restless it felt! So much that his legs would not continue and he looked over his shoulder at the spot in the dirt trail where his knees had left their impression. His mind felt as if it were being pulled in a million different directions all at once and though it went against his better judgement, he fell back to the ground where he had been and began passionately digging into the earth with his fingers. And he did so the rest of the day.
It was as the sun slipped away and the moon took up the night shift, bringing its familiar chill, that the mans wife came roaming up the trail and imagine her face to find her husband digging away into the dirt in the night. By this time the man had dug himself a well enough hole so that his entire body could fit in it while he was on his knees and sizeable piles of dirt littered the surrounding area. So entangled with his intent to find the secret of the glint that shone so brilliantly in his eyes, the man did not even notice his wife standing over him until her fourth or fifth noise of disapproval. He looked up to see her with her hands upon her hips, looking none too pleased to find him, of all places doing of all things, here and that. He tried to explain his reasons though when he put them into words even he himself didnt think they made much sense or felt like much of an argument. So as marital disputes go, she had her usual upper hand and won. Which, as their history had taught the man, was enough for her, for now. She insisted he come home, take a nice bath, eat some of her wonderfully splendid food and go to bed. He graciously declined insisting instead to stay there and continue digging. With a look of displeasure, she threw arms into the air and stormed back home. The man gave a sigh and went back to searching.
Over the course of the next week, the sun did what it does and the man was still doing what had quickly become his. He had dug all through the week, night and day and could stand straight up in his hole and still the walls of it would stretch three whole yards overhead. Yet, still, he felt slightly discouraged that he had seen not even a suggestion of the mysterious glint. Nevertheless, his determination only faltered during brief moments when the frustrations of what he was doing pecked at him too hard or in places not yet callused over. His wife would come out everyday and remind him of what a fool he was to be digging such a ridiculous hole to find what was nothing but a figment of his erratic imagination. How the places he should be everyday kept asking her why he had stopped showing up and a few of those places saying not to bother anymore. She told him she hoped hed stop with this silliness lest she lost her mind like he was his. The man gave up trying to reason with her by the end of that week and settled with making agreeable tones and nodding his head while he continued to dig away at the dirt with his hands. And he and she did so like this for the next year.
The man was filthy. In his year of nearly constant laborious digging and searching nothing had turned up at all. Not even the smallest fragment of optimism could he find in all the feet and layers of soil and rock he had gone through. His entire life had changed. He never left his hole and the only task he ever did besides digging was hoping and thinking. His wife started to come out to visit him less frequently and even when she did anymore, she would only plead that he stop his nonsense and come home. Many times she would bring their family just to emphasize her arguments. In the end, they only emphasized his resolve. The mans friends, some persuaded by his wife, would visit him and try to reason with him with reasons the man didnt care for. He could not be swayed and worked in diligent silence despite all the distractions his old life would involve him in. He had a new purpose and though at times he tried explaining this to others, no one quite understood the significance he placed on it all and even the man himself sometimes didnt know for sure either. His intentions were sincere and all he knew for sure was that to leave behind his hole, his digging, his quest to find the mysterious brilliance of the glint, would be a much quicker end to his life than not to. His mind had already decided upon that and his body was the only tool with which it had to work with.
The man dug and continued looking for what drove him for what seemed like forever. Indeed, eventually he had no idea how long it had been since he began. His wife had left him decades ago and took his family with her, leaving him a shovel as a gift in their place. He was thankful. His old friends stopped showing even before that and he spent his life utterly alone with his own thoughts and the now rhythmic sound of digging. He had grown old, so old, and his hair had grown long and stringy. His beard hung down to his belly and all of it had turned to a dull white color. His body seemed to have lost almost all of its muscle and, if one could see him, he looked weak and fragile. The old man never went topside anymore and spent all his time deep in his hole, further down now than even he could ever guess. He rarely slept, almost never stopped working, and while his thoughts were good company he did still long to hear them voiced again for he hadnt even spoken a word in at least the last forty years. What reason had he to? His eyes, he sometimes thought, might have gone blind and hed never know it because the darkness of his hole was so consuming and yet so familiar to him now that he could barely remember anything such as the sun and its warmth or the moon and its chill. Tirelessly, he dug and clawed away until finally one day he suddenly stopped and let out a sigh that had grown in him for what seemed like an eternity. Weakly, he sat down on the floor of his hole, buried his face into his hands, and wept. The tears rolled off his cheeks and into his dirty beard like a flood and he felt as though the time of his death was near and that he would never discover that small but brilliant light. He felt as though he would never truly understand. Dishearteningly, he brushed the tears from his old, withered face and solemnly opened his eyes only to catch, just in a fraction of a second, the small lustrous glint that he had been so earnestly trying to re-discover! The man could hardly breathe as he leapt forward and pushed away palms of dirt and dug into the earth as his heart raced harder and faster than it had ever before. And then finally, after so long, he found it and pulled the brilliant light up from its place and its radiance nearly blinded him as he stared in awe. Tears swelled up and rolled down his face in such a complete sense of joy that he had never known. The old man held the brilliance against his body and all the worlds inquiries, thoughts, and ideas swarmed over him in such clarity that even the most complicated of them now seemed incredibly simple. Knowledge and wisdom flowed through his mind and eased every part of his body for now he understood everything. No answer alleviated him from the most basic of questions to the most intricate or seemingly unanswerable philosophical viewhe finally understood it all. Life, the universe, their meanings and their properties, their purposes and reasons, no sense of doubt loomed over the old man anymore. And as the light he held in his arms like a child faded out, there were no more questions. There was only pure awareness over all that ever was as the man knew it to be.
Excitedly, the old man knew what it was he had to do. He had to share his discoveries! He had to share with others what the brilliant light had shared with him. Enthusiastically, he began a triumphant climb from his hole and wondered about the sorts of reactions that he would receive once he finally reached the opening. He smiled and laughed in delight at the thoughts of peoples faces when he would tell them the answers to their mysteries and solve all their problems. He thought of how he would better the world now that Truth had finally been found.
The old man arose from his hole, stretched every kink out of his body and slowly opened his eyes. His face, in doing so, sharply fell into a state of horror. The world had changed. Giant buildings and other foreign looking edifices surrounded him and blocked out the horizon and sky that he once favored so much. His old path wasnt there anymore and nothing-absolutely nothing-looked, felt, or was familiar to him. Doubt started to pour over him again but he tried to shake it off because he knew he held all the answers to all the secrets. To prove this to himself he ran (as well as he could manage in his feeble condition) up to the nearest passerby and told the person to ask him anything in the world. The person, who the old man thought resembled himself, merely looked at him awkwardly and walked away in a state of confusion. The old man didnt understand. He tried going up to more people but not one of them seemed to comprehend a word he was saying. The ideas and constructs in his head were almost impossible to communicate because any level of communication seemed to be inadequate to explain anything to them. He himself only understood them. In desperation he ran up to more people and tried to talk to them and a few finally talked back. But their words, while they sounded similar to his own, were alien to him and neither party could ascertain what the other was trying to say. All of existence had changed while he was gone and while he did still understand everything that he had come to understand and in the same brilliance that the light had taught him, none of it could get through to these people and none of it, the old man feared, would even apply to them if he could. He wandered around this new world aimlessly for the few months that he had left in him, and died misunderstood and alone in his brilliance.


-Ronin