A Letter to a Friend
Photo: Johannes Andersson
In his book The Darkest White, and in his Alpine Club of Canada (Rockies section) Facebook comment to you, Blehm perfectly illustrates that he has not yet qualified himself to know the key learning from La Traviata. If he had, he would have asked you Margo, why you believe his book to be a fairy tale and he would have earnestly listened to your answer.
The most important lesson from La Traviata is having the heart to listen to the perspectives of others, especially when it hurts or could cause others harm. When we have the grace of humility to listen, we learn not only something about ourselves, but we also have better mastery about the situation at hand. When we have the heart to listen, very deeply to the messages and words of ourselves and others we can’t help but make better decisions.
Being able to exercise this, comes only from a very special initiation that we all have access to but most of us wait until we hit the place where we have no other choice. Without this initiation, life is monochromatic and heartless, and many humans prefer things that way because it feels normal. The frequency of the heart is different and what is said with the heart is impossible to hear without the initiation. Both you and I Margo know about and have taken this initiation; It is letting life’s pain in and the only way to stand the pain of our lives is to open our heart, for the heart is so much stronger than the head and its’ fragile intellect.
Eric is not wrong with anything he writes in his book or the post, but he is still missing the heart of the matter even after all of his research. I will not write this to him in the post. It will only lead to an intellectual argument that is a waste of time. Men who can only meet with their intellect will lay waste to matters that are best dealt with by the heart. He currently lacks the soft-wear of the heart to understand and likely his day is yet to come, because there is no escape for any of us. Even then, when hit with the hammer of life, the choice is up to us of how we respond.
We are not better than those who have not had the initiation, it is just that we are on the way down from the mountaintop and we are meeting those who are still on the climb. Just humans on a different stage of the journey.
