There’s more to life than safety

On the whole, I haven’t been one to jump at taking risks. In fact, truth be told, my propensities probably lean towards being overly cautious. I usually do what I can to resist change, and when I’m unsuccessful tend to be slow to adapt.

But, old dogs can learn new tricks…well, we can at least try!

I’ve been facing a number of changes lately, and hopefully I’ll be up to the challenges they present and will grow as a result. That’s the heart of what The End seems to want to convey, too—that living life means not always living in safety, away from the world, but rather in the middle of it all, possibly neighboring treachery.

As far as endings go, I thought The End ended up ending the best way it could—by pointing to the way in which we can never know THE whole story, but only ever parts, although because all our stories are intertwined even these parts are quite meaningful and substantial.

I only hope that with as my life comes closer to its end (as all our lives do every day) that more and more of my life’s parts join, maybe never whole, but always fuller and fuller.

Snicket, Lemony. The End: A Series of Unfortunate Events, Book the Thirteenth. New York: HarperCollins, 2006.

(94-95) But if you live among people, whether they are people in your family, in your school, or in your secret organization, then every moment of your life is an incident of peer pressure, and you cannot avoid it any more than a [end page 94] boat at sea can avoid a surrounding storm.

(95-96) …if you try to avoid every instance of peer pressure you will end up without any peers whatsoever, and the trick is to succumb to enough pressure that you do not drive your peers away, but not so much that you end up in [end page 95] a situation in which you are dead or otherwise uncomfortable.

(163) When you think about something, it adds a bit of weight to your walk, and as you think about more and more things you are liable to feel heavier and heavier, until you are so burdened you cannot take any further steps, and can only sit and stare at the gentle movements of the ocean waves or security guards, thinking too hard about too many things to do anything else.

(222) Sooner or later, everyone’s story has an unfortunate event or two—a schism or a death, a fire or a mutiny, the loss of a home or the destruction of a tea set. The only solution, of course, is to stay as far away from the world as possible and lead a safe, simple life.

(288-289) One could say, in fact, that no story really has a beginning, and that no story really has an end, as all of the world’s stories [end page 288] are as jumbled as the items in the arboretum, with their details and secrets all heaped together so that the whole story, from beginning to end, depends on how you look at it.

(306) There is a kind of crying I hope you have not experienced, and it is not just crying about something terrible that has happened, but a crying for all of the terrible things that have happened, not just to you but to everyone you know and to everyone you don’t know and even the people you don’t want to know, a crying that cannot be diluted by a brave deed or a kind word, but only by someone holding you as your shoulders shake and your tears run down your face.

(322-323) One cannot spend forever sitting and [end page 323] solving the mysteries of one’s history, and no matter how much one reads, the whole store can never be told.

(3-4) “You’d think we would have had enough treachery for a lifetime,” Klaus said, “but there’s [end page 3] more to life than safety.”