When I was young, I had to choose between the life of being and the life of doing. And I leapt at the latter… — Ursula K. Le Guin
When I was young, I had to choose between the life of being and the life of doing. And I leapt at the latter like a trout to a fly. But each deed you do, each act, binds you to itself and to its consequences, and makes you act again and yet again. Then very seldom do you come upon a space, a time like this, between act and act, when you may stop and simply be. or wonder who, after all, you are.
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“There’s nothing to fear, Lebannen,” he said gently, mockingly. “They were only the dead.”
“You exist: without name, without form. You cannot see the light of day; you cannot see the dark. You sold the green earth and the sun and stars to save yourself. But you have no self. All that which you sold, that is yourself. You have given everything for nothing. And so now you seek to draw the world to you, all that light and life you lost, to fill up your nothingness. But it cannot be filled. Not all the songs of earth, not all the stars of heaven, could fill your emptiness.”
So the first step out of childhood is made all at once, without looking before or behind, without caution, and nothing held in reserve.
