Here’s the thing I understand now that I couldn’t have a month ago, before any of this: the whole enormous business — the gold, the two dead worlds, the long climb back, the harvest, all of it — comes down, in the end, to something small enough to do before lunch.
It comes down to the next choice. Just the next one.
I’ve spent this week thinking the assignment was to make up for Maldek and Mars — some grand redemptive gesture big enough to balance two planets. It isn’t. There is no gesture that big, and looking for one was just my old pride wearing a humbler coat. The assignment is smaller and far harder. The assignment is: when the fork shows up again — and it shows up about forty times a day, I’ve started counting — choose the love instead of the power. That’s it. That’s the whole of it. Not once, grandly. Constantly, plainly, in traffic, in the kitchen, in the ten o’clock meeting.
And I’ll tell you what nobody warns you about choosing love, the thing the old material puts so well it stopped me cold: you don’t get to know where it takes you. Power you can plan. Power’s got a map — you know exactly what you’re getting and what it’ll cost. Love’s got no map at all. You choose it and then you just have to follow it, like a fool, into rooms you can’t see, toward outcomes you can’t promise, with no guarantee anyone loves you back. The material even calls it that — being “the fool who loves.” You leap, and you find out on the way down.
I’ve been the other kind of fool. The clever kind. The kind who always knew the angles, the kind who cracked two worlds knowing exactly what he was doing. I’d like to try being the other one now. The one who doesn’t know, and leaps anyway.
So this morning, when the boss — my newly un-warred-with boss — did a small thing that a week ago would’ve had me reaching for the weapon out of pure habit, I felt the old groove pull, deep as ever, two planets deep. And I didn’t take it. I chose the other thing. The kind thing. The thing I couldn’t see the end of.
It was the smallest moment. Nobody saw it. And it felt like the first genuinely free thing I’ve done since the gold.