This is a result of my sorrow at being seperated from Her, and trying to find a way to intellectualize it away by understanding it. Most things that I can come to understand, I can come to accept. So, I made it a quest to understand this particular facet of life and how things work. As She reads this, I hope She understands that I certainly feel nothing but love and affection (sometimes frustration) toward her. She knows as well as I that sometimes one path leads to a place from which we can not walk so many other paths that we want to. Not every path connects to every other one, "and knowing how way leads on to way..." sometimes we can't ever go back to the branching of that one path that denies the others to us. We choose the path, but not where it will take us.

 

It’s funny how the ending of a story can be so many different things. What’s even more amazing, is that it’s rarely the ending. Even when we think the resolution, or at least the collapse, has come and gone, its effects are still there. Sometimes we may not even be aware of it, but that story still affects us. Those events that reflected off our lives remain like a shadow darkening that place that they used to inhabit. Even after we leave the intersection of that particular episode behind, we still find ourselves stopping and looking behind us, like we have the chance to run back. But we don’t. Not in most cases anyway…

It seems the shadow of that event is even more complex than the event itself. Especially when it is a story involving a lot of intense emotion. Strangely enough, the story is not often ‘resolved’ but simply moved through, and left to resolve itself in the minds of the characters. The two or more characters who are caught in the brief maelstrom and forced to spin around the center of the event sometimes find that the event has dissolved, flinging them back into their lives with no more understanding or resolution than they had when it began. It seems that life simply moved them along and then let them go, forcing them into a story with no regard for their thoughts on the subject.

However, this is the ironic part…once they are in the story, it seems that its outcome is up to those characters. They are the ones that write the story and determine the outcome. Also, they are the ones that must live through the aftershadow for the rest of their lives.

When you regard the matter through the usual human perception of fairness, the matter stinks. To have someone, or a group of people thrust into a situation with no consent or consideration by life, to find yourself facing something that you never wanted or even thought about, is not fair. But that is how life is. Unfortunately, reality does not take us into account. Neither does it weep over the sadness it leaves, nor chuckle at the joy it brings. We become, things happen, we deal with it, we die. This is what we face. Even though it is that simple, it becomes very complex.

The ability to focus on several considerations is what brings so much ambiguity into the equation of life. When approached from different angles, each consideration can be happy, or sad, good, or bad, and the fact that we can see them from different angles at once, means that we can experience that ambiguity of emotion and decision. This is the essence of good storytelling in one respect. Why? Because it happens that way in real life. The story that can make its listener both happy and sad is a good story. It is one that mirrors life in some fundamental way. It makes its audience and the characters in it wiser for the telling. Wisdom brings understanding, but it also brings grief. Wisdom is a good thing, but it makes us sad. This is the paradox of the story. This is what life brings us. We are thrown into experiences, and we learn. This is because we come to understand things as we experience them, and with understanding comes wisdom, and with this wisdom, often come sadness and grief.

This paradox is the result, as stated, of humanity’s ability to focus on multiple considerations, which is the result of what I call the inherent universal principle of possibility. This principle states that when any element interacts with another element, if either of the two elements contains ‘will’ then there is more than one possibility for the outcome of any situation involving these elements.

As practical example, let us take two elements, one a hammer, and the other, a man. These two elements are separate, but when one interacts with the other, a situation is created. Since the man has ‘will’ then there are many possible outcomes for the situation. The man can ‘will’ to use the hammer to build something. This is good. But if the man uses the hammer to smash someone in the head, this is bad (unless the man was defending himself, in which case, again, it is good). As one can see, the possibilities when one element has ‘will’ are many, and varied.

But what happens when both elements have ‘will’? The situation's complexity and possible outcomes multiply almost infinitely. Each of the elements not only use one another, as the man with the hammer, but also affect one another, emotionally, and intellectually. In addition, when both elements have will, the situation does not necessarily ever have a distinct ending, as when the man finished building something. Though the situation in which the two elements interacted may have passed, the effects may still move on, and as we have seen, the effects can be many and ambiguous, and possibly even contrary. That is the curse of man, and that is a description of relationships.

That is what happens when love hurts. That is why something that is ‘good’ can do so much damage. That is why when you love someone so much, you may have to make a decision that will hurt you, or them. When you make a decision to leave someone that you love, for some necessary reason, you are glad that you love them enough to make the right decision, but that decision hurts because it takes you away from your love. Thus you face an ambiguity, or that paradox. Because you love someone, you must give up the one you love. That is both a good and a bad thing. You see it from two angles, and both of them cause a different reaction in you. You are happy to do something good for them because you love them, but you are also sad because it takes something that you love away from you, and than makes you sad.

Without wisdom (understanding) you could have made the choice that made both of you happy (to not give them up). You would only have seen the situation from one angle because you would not have truly understood it. Thus, you would have no consideration of doing something that contradicted that angle. However, you have understanding and realize that it is best (for whatever reason) to do something that will not make either of you happy, except in the fact that you did it to help someone that you love.

This is more often the case than we realize, simply because we do not often think of it in these terms. But this ambiguity and complexity permeates our lives because of our interaction with 'will'. And it is often the poignant tale that we are thrown into and so we face such an ambiguity, and understanding this does not make it any easier. The person who sees that this is the way of things feels no better when they have to leave someone that they love behind. Even though the situation may be long in the past, the shadow of that decision remains. True love is always really there in the background. It will always be a shadow in the path of someone who has had to give it up, and Disney’s Beauty and the Beast is a travesty, in that it DOES NOT always work out. There is no magical renewal, or resurrection. The beast should have died for his love of Belle, for that is the sacrifice that his love required him to make-no matter how sad it would have made Belle, or hurt him. That is the price that we pay. That is the ambiguity of love and life and the inherent universal principle of possibility.