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June 19 - July 9, 2024
Giving advice to a child is like flinging sand at an obsidian wall. Nothing sticks. The brutal truth is that we each suffer our own lessons—they can’t be danced round. They can’t be slipped past. You cannot gift a child with your scars—they arrive like webs, constricting, suffocating, and that child will struggle and strain until they break. No matter how noble your intent, the only scars that teach them anything are the ones they earn themselves.’
there is no universal law that places a greater value upon human life over that of a wild beast. Why would you ever imagine otherwise?
You blink, you lose that time for ever. You can’t even be sure how long that blink lasted. A moment, a thousand years. You can’t even know for sure that what you see now is the same as what you saw before. You can’t. You think it is. You tell yourself that, convince yourself of that. Just a continuation of everything you knew before. What you see is still there. That’s what you tell yourself. That’s the game of reassurance your mind plays. To keep things sane. But think on that one blink—you’ve all known it—when all that you thought was real suddenly changes. From one side of the blink to the
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‘For every soul sweeping away the dust,’ said a voice behind her, ‘there are a thousand scattering it by the handful.’
‘Parents,’ resumed Hanavat, ‘may choose to have children, but they do not choose their children. Nor can children choose their parents. And so there is love, yes, but there is also war. There is sympathy and there is the poison of envy. There is peace and that peace is the exhausted calm between struggles for power. There is, on rare occasions, true joy, but each time that precious, startling moment then dwindles, and in each face you see a hint of sorrow—as if what was just found will now be for ever remembered as a thing lost.
