“’It’s me own fault – I should’ve been paying more attention to where we was goin’. Now you’ll never get your star, and I’ll never get my merchandise. One day some other poor bugger lost in the wood’ll find our skellingtons picked clean as whistles and that’ll be that.’ …
“’Is there anything we can do?’ Tristan asked.
“’Nothing I can think of. If only we knew where the true path was… even a serewood couldn’t destroy the true path. Just hide it from us, lure us off of it…’ The little man shrugged, and sighed.
“Tristan reached his hand up and rubbed his forehead. ‘I… I do know where the path is,’ he said. He pointed. ‘It’s down that way.’ …
“’How do you know?’ ask the man.
“’I know,’ replied Tristan.
– Neil Gaiman
Each of us is on a path. Each of us travels that path ‘alone’. Each of us meets many interesting characters along the route. Always those characters are ourselves. It’s as plain as the nose on your face. But being that it’s the nose, we need a mirror to see it. And so we have companions. Companions are the mirrors. Always those companions are ourselves.
If we’ve been schooled in the West at any time since Aristotle, we have been told that we should, we need, to lives our lives in moral fashion. That the quality of that morality is evidenced by reason. That reason is determined by our ability to apply the rules of logic (whether the outcome is correct or not). That logic is a systematized set of codes or signals that lead us from the faulty to the valid – from point A to point B – never in a circle. And, that it is through the logical process that we discover the path to happiness, to the ‘good’, to God’s promised land.
Problematic is that not all of the characters we meet along the way have been so schooled. Further, some who were have rejected some or all of what they’ve been taught. And, depending upon when, in our lives – or theirs – we meet these characters, we may find them/ourselves in either turmoil or confidence with regard to their understanding of these teachings. It’s all very confusing – not at all like the nose on your face.
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