Ever since I was a little kid I’ve always really liked mythology. Things like the Roman, Greek and Egyptian gods and goddesses, fantastic creatures like the Chimera, Hydra, Phoenix and Cerberus, the Norse and Valhalla and Ragnarok. It’s incredible to me how cultures have created these stories to explain the things they could not understand, sneak in lessons about how your life should be lived, and give an identity to the things we fear most.
It’s a human thing to be afraid of the things we can’t see and comprehend. That’s what makes night so scary. In old maps of the world the Europeans drew scary beasts and wrote “Here Be Monsters” off the western coast because the ocean was this incomprehensible vast thing. People knew that Rupert was always a great sailor, that Rupert sailed off to the west one day and never came back, so Rupert was surely eaten by a Kraken. Let’s not go west any more! And that becomes the way of things. There is this unconquerable fear out there that keeps people from sailing off to their doom, which keeps people safe and whole and is generally an okay thing.
It goes on like this until one day when someone becomes desperate enough to figure out what is really out there. Their need for access to spices and money weighs more than their fear of being gobbled by a Kraken. Plus they’re pretty sure it’s just a really long trip and not filled with mythical sea beasts by this point. So off a brave band of heroes go. The kind of guys who eat scurvy for breakfast and bunk with death by night. They find out the journey is tough, but it’s not fighting a gigantic 200 foot tall beaked octopus tough, and the New World is born.
This brings me to Eve. I was wandering around the city this recently and stumbled on this young homeless woman with a dog sitting outside a store called the Garden of Eden. It was a scene that struck me. It was too much of a coincidence for me to ignore it, and it hit on the older brother in me, the person who wants to help people, and the guy who really likes dogs. I was watching her and I had a thousand thoughts running through my head. What could I possibly do to help her? I was angry that I wasn’t in a position that I could do anything meaningful for this person. What could have led to her being in this place? What could have been so bad or so wrong that living on the streets of New York and relying on the kindness of strangers was the last option left for this person?
As I was standing off to the side thinking about all this, a woman comes up. She gave off this yuppie, touristy kind’ve vibe. She stopped and was taking pictures of the girl and her dog, as if she was another tourist attraction on the way to the Flatiron Building. “Look Humphrey, a real live urchin! This one isn’t even as filthy as the other ones … I must have a picture!” … At least is wasn’t a selfie. Something about it repulsed me, and I have a face that betrays how I’m feeling. Eve looked over as I was putting on my best “just stuck an entire pack of sour patch kids in my mouth at once” face and laughed. It made me laugh too, and I took it as an invitation to go and talk to her. I offered to go and get her something if she wanted, since getting around with all her stuff and the dog must be tough. She said no, that she was alright.
We ended up talking for a little while. What we said isn’t really as important as what I remember feeling. Eve had problems in her life that were so big and so beyond her ability to face them that they became a dragon. They were a massive beast of sinew and scale, cunning wickedness and burning flame that no mere mortal could ever hope to face let alone get past. Whatever problems Eve has now; staying warm, getting enough food, staying safe, they were easier to face than that dragon.
It’s something we all do. There are things in life that seem to big for us to deal with. We create our own dragons. Our problems grow in our heads. We run through every worst case scenario and defeat ourselves 100 times before we ever even set foot in front of our problems. We are so beaten down that we can no longer even try. Instead of facing the dragon that we have convinced ourselves will beat us we take on other challenges or we create new problems for ourselves that we know deep down we can fix. We get these small victories to convince ourselves that we’re still capable, that even though we can’t face the dragon, we can still do something. That’s all well and good, but the dragon is still out there, still waiting, still growing larger waiting for the day when we have no choice, when desperation makes us face that which we fear the most, and we have to pray that our best case scenario is the best defeat out of the 100 that we imagined.
We are all blessed by fate. That we are given a chance at life is hitting the cosmic lottery. The impossible combinations of genetic material between our fathers and mothers that resulted in us being conceived and being given this brief fleeting opportunity to live as who we are is incredible. In the marathon of inheritance we were in a race against 100 million versions of ourselves. Nine months before we were born we were already champions. We owe it to the other us’s who didn’t get this amazing opportunity, to be the best we can ever be. There are 99.9 million versions of us that would give anything to have the problems that we have just so they could experience for one second what an apple tastes like. Never let an opportunity go by unchallenged that another version of you would have faced before it became something worse. We are born as heroes. Heroes are the ones who face the dragons.
Coffee is Ready 