There Is a Precipice

In January of this year, I wrote a post titled "A Project Worth Mentioning." In it, I spotlighted a writing collection sponsored by National Public Radio with the mission statement "A public dialogue about belief - one essay at a time." The details of my discovering it are a bit sketchy - but I do believe a friend mentioned it to me and thought I should take a look. I did. And then, by extension, you did, too.

When I first visited the project, our community was in a holding pattern as we awaited word of our beloved friend, David Hames, who was in Port-au-Prince during the Haiti earthquake. Also around that time, I wrote another post titled "The Precipice." As often happens with the organic nature of writing, that post morphed into a submission for the This I Believe campaign. I doubt it was coincidental that I found one and wrote the other mere days apart and that the two fit so elegantly together - project and penning, you might say. In any event, I rewrote the post to fit the editors' specifications and, what do you know...the day before my father's funeral, NPR and the campaign's editors contacted me to say my essay was chosen for publication.

 
You can find essay number 76610 entitled "This I Believe" here.

I want to say two things about this publication. First, whether faith in God - or any higher power, for that matter - is your cup of tea, I'd like to be so bold as to ask you to consider the metaphor anyway. The older I grow, the more I realize the fragility of existence in the face of an ever-revolving door of coming and going, staying and leaving...in matters more everyday than death or life. We're all making choices, coming to terms with the realities of life - but how are we doing that? What's our method? And is it working? Because, in the end, we've all got to stare at the precipice, deciding with the power of free will just what we'll do in response to it.

Second, it is not happenstance I received this news the day before laying my father to rest. I reread this piece - for the first time in six months - and see that, not surprisingly, the metaphor applies today...albeit in the face of a different grief under altered circumstances. Nevertheless, I'll go to the precipice again and again in this life, considering issues of should I stay or can I go, whether I should drive away or pitch a tent to stay awhile. At the very least, I am even more fully aware that there is, indeed, a precipice.

And it's hard.
It's a choice.
It's faith unabridged.

This I Believe.