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Introduction: A Long Walk Through A Short Life
by Steven Craig
For an instant, I questioned what I believed in, these ideals and aspirations on which I base all of my life. For an instant, I was less than what I am.
To hold true to your selected path at all times is often hopeless. To believe in the values you place on life as others discount their worth is hard. To know of others, to know yourself, what burden is truly greater?
We stand before a mirror and admire ourselves and ignore truth for the momentary whim of Godhood. We say I am young and healthy, and believe it will be thus forever. I am not yet dead, therefore I can never die... and with that thought in our minds, we waste away each sunrise with greed, of selfish illusions of ourselves, and spread the deceit and hypocrisy of bent truths, reneged promises, and outright lies.
Then one fatal day, the wrinkles are revealed on the velvet skin, gray obscures the halo about your head, to move is to experience pain, to think is to only express hate or whimper over the youth one missed. You find that the ones who loved you were the ones you chose to ignore and spat upon. And those you loved used you to fortify themselves and left you all alone, near this very spot, to face yourself and all the evaporated glories of your life.
And the cries are heard growing in volume each night ... :OH! What a fool I have been! And with them, the shadows of other fools seeking to hide from themselves for the rest of the life they must now endure.
I have had an experience with all things, many people and a few precious moments that I will always treasure. I will not falter or concede any which I hold dear, that which I would do for others or have done for. I am aware of truth, of Love, of compassion, understanding, of caring, feeling, and of happiness, however little there is of each dealt out, and of the importance of these truths to me and whoever it is I share them with.
To Love is to do all. And to have all done for. I intend to see this through. I will never forget what molded my life from amid the ashes and ruins. I will never depart on any other path of life, for either personal fortune or momentary fame.
It may indeed be a long road, a very lonely path. But for me, there is only less to be found elsewhere.
These words may not long survive me. But one must realize that they are only a token expression of a living part of me, this hope, this daily reality of the way I live my life, and what I hope to obtain.
I will burn my candle in the wind, and it shall not fail. I will hold in the face of the storm, and I shall not be swept away. It is as my life is, only but one small candle, but it is even more so a part of a still greater flame.
06/24/2006 Posted on 06/24/2006
Copyright © 2024 Steven Craig
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