WRITE TEAM: Dealing with dead ends

It doesn’t matter what path you travel to reach your goals, life’s full of dead ends, and when you hit a dead end, you have a few choices open to you. You can find another way to your goal, give up or settle on a different goal.

The other day I started thinking more about dead ends and how to deal with them, and I decided there weren’t only those three generalized options. I surmised that you could also transcend dead ends by evolving (metaphorically). I then determined that there are two key ways you can evolve to meet your goals.

You can grow horns and smash your way through the barrier before you. You can obliterate the obstacles in your path, leaving destruction and tears in your wake. You might reach your goal, but you’ll have lost more than you gained in the end, as the price of those horns is your soul.

You don’t pay all at once. You pay in installments throughout your life. Each day that goes by stacks the interest against you so that you have to give up more and more of yourself to cover the expenses. After it all, you’ll have nothing of real value, but you might manage to fool yourself into believing you do until the end.

Or ... you can grow wings. The wings are earned. You pay for their every feather with your every act of selflessness, of goodness, of bravery, and with every show of faith and determination. You’ll have to work harder for those wings initially, but when you get them, they can carry you over any obstacle, though you’ll be hunted for having them. Many will try to shoot you down or trick you into giving them up. You’ll have to fly through many storms. It’ll seem to you that everyone is your enemy, and most will be. You might lose a few feathers along the way, but if you stay strong and firm in your faith, you’ll survive and eventually thrive. You’ll be a star in the dark depths of the night sky, a beacon to everyone else struggling to hold on to their own light. You won’t just reach your goals, you’ll leave behind a legacy that may guide others who struggle.

Though the horns may seem to give you results sooner, they can’t keep you from falling. Eventually, the weight of those horns will drag you down, the interest and back payments will be owed, and you’ll fall as a husk of your former self, your vessel filled not with the sweet honey of victory but with the bitter bile of agony, hunger and defeat. Your harvest will be rotten, your legacy a warning to others who think a soul is expendable. Within you will be cosmic chalk lines on the crumbling concrete of your being, marking where your butchered soul once was.

With the wings you’ll face much suffering, but your harvest will be hearty. You’ll be able to look back on your life and, though you may feel sorrow for the horrors you witnessed, you can rest knowing that you didn’t just transcend all the dead ends and obstacles in your life and accomplish your goals, you truly earned your rewards — and earned them well.

KAYLA COOK has lived in Ottawa since 2012. She can be reached by emailing tammies@mywebtimes.com.