A Brightness Long Ago

by Guy Gavriel Kay

Balancing acts of the soul. Acquiescence happens more than its opposite—a rising up in anger and rejection. There are wolves in the world, inside elegant palaces as well as in the dark woods and the wild.

I haven’t always found that it is our intentions, the decisions we make, that shape and guide our lives. The opposite, just as often, it seems to me. Impulse creates our stories, or chance, the entirely unforeseen. And what we remember of our own past can be unpredictable. I didn’t learn this at school in Avegna, but I think Guarino would have agreed. Beyond that, we are often borne where the winds of our time carry us. We might sail where we like in a ship—until a storm overtakes us, or pirates, boarding at sunrise. Calm waters and easy winds allow an illusion of mastery, control. But it is only ever that. The devout say we must trust in Jad. I have come to believe life is easier for them. Reversals are more easily dealt with when there is faith. I have seen too much by now to be truly devout any more, though I still fear judgment for that sliding towards heresy, especially when I’m awake at night, and I often am. It is an uneasy world one walks through when there is no firm belief in what will come after, or that what happens to us as we live through our days is affected by the correctness of our faith. I don’t talk about this, of course.

I think, it is the best thought I have, that he was devoted to the idea of being loyal, in a world with little of that. That a man needed to drop an anchor somewhere, declare a truth, find a harbour.

Perhaps in the darkest times all we can do is refuse to be part of the darkness.

We like to believe, or pretend, we know what we are doing in our lives. It can be a lie. Winds blow, waves carry us, rain drenches a man caught in the open at night, lightning shatters the sky and sometimes his heart, thunder crashes into him bringing the awareness he will die. We stand up, as best we can under that. We move forward as best we can, hoping for light, kindness, mercy, for ourselves and those we love. Sometimes these things come, sometimes they do not.

Shelter can be hard to find. A place can become our home for reasons we do not understand. We build the memories that turn into what we are, then what we were, as we look back. We live in the light that comes to us.