The man who lost himself
He walked a long way. And at the end of the walking, he found a mountain.
It was a mountain that was on no map, or perhaps it had always been there and he had never raised his eyes. It rose farther than the eye could reach, and its summit vanished into a cloud that never parted. At its foot, seated on a smooth stone, was a very old woman with pale eyes, who seemed to be waiting — not for him in particular, but for whoever might come.
“You’re lost,” she said. It wasn’t a question.
The man didn’t know how to answer. He only lowered the sack of stones to the ground, and the thud was so deep that he himself was startled by his own weight.
“There is a way back,” the old woman went on. “But it doesn’t go forward. It goes up.” And she pointed to the mountain. “What you lost of yourself is up there. And there is only one way to get there: climbing, and letting go, with every step, of what you brought in that sack.”
The man looked at the mountain, at the cloud hiding the top, and felt his heart tighten.
“How long does it take to reach the summit?” he asked.
The old woman smiled, and in her smile there was an ancient tenderness, the tenderness of someone who had once asked that very same question.
“The summit is not a place,” she said. “When you understand that, you’ll be almost there.”
