Echo and Abyss; A Responsibility to Awe
It is not the mountain we conquer but ourselves.
– Sir Edmund Hillary
I climbed to a mountaintop to sermonize, but alas, I found myself rapt by the stars at night; suddenly, I felt my small being struggle to compare itself to the size of infinity. Slowly, my clenched fists relaxed, allowing night air to cool my palms, at which point wonder overwhelms me. See me standing there, gawking upward, mouth agape, as my hubris, the belief that I know answers about the world, is replaced with the realization that I don’t even know which questions to ask. At this moment, all my certainties dissolve into curiosity.
As I leave the mountain and return to the world below, I commit myself to a spirit of inquiry, a responsibility to awe. Approaching the city, my cell signal returns, I check Facebook, and just like that, I feel myself becoming seduced by confident political and tribal ideologies. The comfortable doctrinal certainties I shed on the mountaintop are still there; they lay in wait, beckoning me to abandon my newfound spirit of inquiry, trading it instead for intellectual laziness.
My image ‘Echo and Abyss’ reminds me how silly it is to shout my brawny opinions into the Universe.