…and on my way to the old city, I came across a peasant who was standing right at the edge of a cliff, his shoulders hanging heavily at his sides and his gaze lost in the horizon. Carefully, I walked toward him and made him aware of my presence. He turned his head and, with a somber expression on his face, asked me what I was looking for. I sat on a patch of straw and offered him my attention to listen to his story.
“I was an orphan in the village where I lived,” he started, “abused and mistreated, until the day a traveler arrived from a foreign country and found me roaming the streets looking for food. He asked me for a place to stay and told me he needed someone to care for him and keep him company. A few days after he settled, he offered me shelter, food, clothing, and the promise of keeping me unconditionally, if only I stayed with him as his loyal companion—one more day, every day.”
“For the first time, I felt secure and cared for, and little by little I shared with him the secret life I had: I showed him fields of pasture never seen by anyone before; I sang him songs I composed whenever pain surrounded me; I fed him milk and honey and bathed him with water from the first spring rain.”
“I also gave him moments of despair, pain, and delusion, and each time fear overcame my reason, he protected me from the demons of my past. My master’s eyes held the meaning of compassion and the wisdom of a child. Day after day, he built me up and showed me all that I could be, as long as I stayed with him.”
“Then why do you seem so burdened?” I inquired. “Have you lost your master?”
“The day came when my master taught me all he had to teach and gave me all he had to give,” the peasant said, “and his patience grew thin and his tolerance vanished. All the pain and grudges he had quietly chosen to keep for years—aware of my pain and fearful of my reactions and despair—came adrift with rage and vengeance. Scorned and bitter, he turned against me, and I, afraid of his abandonment, became irrational and delusional as I had been before he welcomed me into his life. All the demons he had put to sleep and the nightmares he had quieted returned to hunt me and claim my spirit.”
“Where is he now?” I asked.
“He’s somewhere down there,” he said, signaling the distant town across the cliffs, “living his life as a new man, in the company of his regrets.”
He went back to the edge of the cliff, and his eyes once more became lost in the horizon, as if searching for something that was no longer there.
I stood up and walked away with a life lesson:
Freedom of choice doesn’t give us the right to make others responsible for having made the wrong one.