During the summer, J and I hiked part of the Pembrokeshire Coast Path. After hiking for quite awhile on the first day, we saw this view ahead and I thought, "Oh, how lovely." It turned out to be one of the more challenging sections of the trail, because while it was shady and not awfully steep, it went on and on...and on...and on. For quite some time, there was no way to tell how much further we'd have to go to get to the top. We started noticing benches along the way, which is never a good sign. How many people needed to stop and rest for it to be necessary to haul bench making materials up this trail? Probably a lot.
And so it is and so it goes in life. If I were a preacher, perhaps this would be a sermon illustration. But I am not, and so it is just an observation about how much more effort things often take, how things can look as if they will be easy and beautiful and actually end up being quite hard. And yet, almost always worth it. I'd been wanting to hike that trail for years, and there we were, and it was beautiful and also hard.
But physical challenges are the least of my efforts, if I'm honest. It is so much harder to sustain an effort toward becoming the kind of person I want to be. Sometimes I want a little break, to be honest. To hold my tongue when I want to say something sharp (especially if it is true) is no easy thing. To act in the interests of someone else at the expense of my own desires can be harder than I'd like to admit. But if I'm out here saying (and sometimes I am) that we must all do this in order for things to work, then I need to be doing it myself. That's pretty basic and obvious, I think, but we humans are not always the brightest bulbs in the chandelier. Instead of treating others the way we would like to be treated, we twist the directive to focus on how others should treat us.
It's not that there's not room for teaching people how to treat us. But if we are not willing to make the same effort that we expect of others, and also if we don't recognise that our efforts may be different due to different personalities and cultures, then we won't get very far. This applies to person to person relationships, but also to groups encountering one another. Many wars are sustained under the banner of supposedly righteous revenge, and all we get is more dead people. Zoom in and we'll see broken interpersonal relationships, so now people we love are dead and we also have lost friends. And for what? So we can be on some mythical right side of history? I am tired of it, tired of these impulses in myself and tired of seeing it play out in ever widening circles of violence.
So what now? Well, the high road, if we can find it. In every interaction, checking in, "What would I want to happen to me, if I were sitting opposite where I sit now?" And then we actually have to act on that. Which is hard, because those challenges will keep coming. In everything we do, there is an option to do better. To keep walking up that hill when we cannot see the top. I suppose we must use the benches as we need them, in order to keep ascending. I'm not sure what that looks like in a practical sense. For me, maybe it is a bit of solitude? Perhaps it is different for everyone. In our hearts and minds, we know that eventually we will reach the top if we keep going. That there will be a town there where there is a place to rest and provision for the next section of the journey. Of course, the option exists to, instead, descend to where we started, or even lower. Which one will we take? I think I know.
