Harmless

Harmless is the most dangerous word going. 

I know that now. 

The problem is that we don’t think!

If an alien came down and examined one of us they would see all of our potential. They would marvel at the walking miracles that we undoubtedly are. Then they would conclude that we were a danger to ourselves and everything we encounter because we wilfully squander our potential and live a life of ignorance and instant gratification. 

We want it all and we want it now, regardless of how that pans out. Regardless of the cost.

If our pet breaks into the cupboard where we store its food and eats a month’s worth of food in one sitting we laugh with disappointment and tell the dumb beast that will teach it.

But it won’t.

How can we expect this to be a lesson, when we have the capacity to be better than that pet of ours and yet we are not?

Words have power, I did know that much. I knew it before I encountered Her. It was a hunch at first, then it became a theory, then I saw enough of the world and how words inhabited it to understand their true nature and power.

We speak our truth and this is how we are in the world. We create our realities and we do this via the words we think and the words we painstakingly choose to bring forth into the world.

Then I saw Her.

I bore witness to the true power of words and truth and the love that binds them and us. I became a part of something, only I did not think it through properly. I chose ignorance and I ignored my part in everything. I turned away from the truth of it. 

Words are strange and fascinating things. They actually invite you to think. Have you not seen that? There are certain expressions that we use that when first examined are all wrong. They take some engagement before they make real and substantial sense.

Take love as an example.

Yes, I’ve started with a big hitter there haven’t I?

Love is a feeling, isn’t it?

That’s why it’s centred in our hearts. When love overwhelms us we get this feeling like our chests are going to burst, it is awesome and awe-inspiring and just a little frightening.

To stop there at the feeling stage is to completely miss the point, and what a waste that is. That initial feeling is an invitation to do something about everything. The feeling is nice, but you have to do something about it. Always and forever. That’s a big commitment that. That’s a bigger debt and obligation than a mortgage. It’s the biggest millstone going and we naturally kick against that sort of thing. We are reactive mules as a default. 

Oh, our defaults!

The factory settings on a human being are the biggest joke going! We do not work! But then that is entirely the point. Some of the latest tech mirrors our nature. A modern fighter jet would fall out of the sky if it stopped thinking. Those things are not gliders. They have to constantly adapt and manipulate the air around them in order to make them work in the environment they find themselves in. That’s exactly what we are supposed to do, or else we fall and we fall much farther than one of those planes ever could.

Words have power regardless of what you think or believe. I used to think that they hit harder when you believed. That meaning was the key. But words do their thing regardless, and sometimes they are all the more powerful because you failed to engage. They get you all the same, but if you’re not prepared then they will knock you down, and you will fall, hard.

I suppose that I have to admit the truth now. I was supposed to do that from the outset, but I didn’t want to. You see, even now I am attempting to deny the truth of it. I cannot face the enormity of it. I feel like I am drowning as it is. I struggle to breath and my chest hurts. My chest hurts in a way that has nothing to do with love, if this pain relates to love then it is the absence of love. The pain of emptiness.

And it is all, completely self-inflicted, just as much of our pain is.

I accepted a bribe.

There you go.

There is the truth of it.

Only, it’s not.

You see, if I accepted the bribe then a part of me was open to the bribe already and if it was open to it, receptive to the offer of the bribe, then I was looking for it. That is how something like this works.

He knew that and that is why He came to me.

What harm can it do?

Some words don’t have to be spoken, but they are there all the same.

Harmless, what a terrible word! Ever met a dog and been told that it’s harmless? I’ve been bitten by every dog that I was told was harmless. People are just the same. No one is harmless. They cannot be. They move in this world and in order to move in the world you have to be dangerous. We are the apex predators on this planet, so it is in our very nature to cause harm. Pretending otherwise is dangerous. Believing that pretence even more so.

Words drive our thoughts, our speech and our actions.

I accepted the bribe because it was free money. It was all going to happen anyway, so why not get paid for my troubles? I knew life was never going to be the same again afterwards, so some financial stability was in order. Besides, this is the way of the world, we look for a way to monetise everything. Got a cat that is terrified of cucumbers? That’s a hoot, but more so when your cat goes viral as it screams a strangely human scream, runs into a conveniently placed bucket and then goes blindly crazy wearing said bucket. I watched that one loop around at least ten times before I swiped away in disgust at myself for finding it at all amusing. Doesn’t matter how I felt afterwards, I watched it ten times and that’s what the sponsors are after, our attention. Doesn’t matter how they get it. 

It’s the result that counts.

Only…

It shouldn’t be should it? There are such things as morals and ethics and knowing right from wrong. For a while there I excused my behaviour by saying I was stressed and not thinking properly. How pathetic! How weaselly! I knew what I had done and I knew it was wrong yet I tried to wheedle my way out of it. I tried to square it any which way that I could.

Maybe it’s a good thing that, in the end I didn’t succeed in rationalising my behaviour away. Maybe there is hope for me yet, but there I go again, trying to get away with it instead of facing it…

She said that someone would betray her and that She would be taken away and killed. She described it all in such vivid detail, so when He approached me, it was like fortune had come my way.

The timing of his approach was so fortuitous and He was complicit in my thinking and the way I squared the biggest circle in my life. He was there and He didn’t seem to push…

No, that’s a lie.

It’s all a big fat lie.

I was lying to myself even before He approached me and when He did, He knew, and yet I chose to ignore that and all the warning signs. In my darker moments, I wonder if I was set up. Whether I had all that much of a choice at all. 

Because the kicker is that She knew too.

But that would mean that the fate of the world hangs in such a precarious balance. So precarious and delicate is that balance that one person can make all the difference. Either way. A weak and thoughtless man can take the best of people and deprive the world of them.

He came to me afterwards you know. He told me the truth of it. That’s ironic isn’t it? He doesn’t have a reputation for telling the truth, but then the best of liars weave their deception and deceit in and around truths. They tell people what they want to hear. 

Besides, He knew I felt it and He knew what the truth of it would do to me. Better still, He told me just enough so that I could do the rest.

Two thousand years they have been doing this.

It’s a game.

It’s a test.

It worked one time.

Just the once.

It has failed on numerous occasions. 

He’s me.

He’s you.

She’s also me.

She’s also you.

They manifest every once in a while to see how we’re doing and whether we’re maybe ready for the next part. 

Turns out that we’re not. 

I was too easy. I gave up before we’d even started. They don’t expect us to be saints, just to try. To give it a go. To think.

Now I’m thinking and I know what I have done. 

The problem is that I don’t know what happens next. I can’t begin to understand the full gravity of the consequences of my actions.

Gravity.

I’m falling and I’ll never stop falling, even when I end it with this simple fall. From a tree. The bribe still in my hand. I could never spend this money. That was never the point. The money was my value. 

And it was so much more than that.

When they came to take Her and everything imploded. When they took the others and made them disappear, I understood that the money was their value too. Suddenly the money was all I had left in the world and I didn’t want it. Not the money, nor this world.

It was going to happen anyway, so what harm could it do? 

I think the point was that it didn’t have to be that way, even though She said it, that if we thought it through and did what was right then things would turn out OK. Better than OK if we were consistent and constant and made it stick.

I think the second time around is supposed to be different because we know more than we did back when the first time happened and we’re supposed to have done something about that knowledge. 

We are supposed to be doing something.

So they regularly appear to people and they stage their test, to see how we’re doing and whether we are ready. 

We’ve failed each and every time and I wonder whether we’re running out of chances. Was I given the very last chance, only to throw it all away for us all?

I guess I’ll never know.

*

There is a single witness. He watches as the man drops from the branch of the tree and the coins drop from his hand. Few of them get the height and the knot just right. The knot and the momentum should lead to a clean breaking of their neck. This one is doing a jig and watering and fertilising the ground. 

He watches until it is done, thankful that He does not have to provide assistance. There is something unutterably sad about that. They know that they have failed one last time and they know it is Him come to finish the job. 

He hates being right about them. It’s not like He would be out of a job if they bucked their ideas up and put the necessary effort in. Things would get interesting then! Really interesting! 

He takes a deep breath and prepares himself for a visit to his Father. He’s the one remaining advocate for these people. She gave up on them before the industrial age and lost all patience after that, and She has their Father’s ear. 

He knows Father doesn’t do it for them. He agrees with his daughter in this respect. These people are possessed of a self-imposed madness that they could at any moment divest themselves of. It is a cloak of all that is bad which they actively choose to wear and yet they blame Him for it. Nothing could be further from the truth. He identifies with these people. He knows they could come good. Given time they could do the right thing and the most frustrating part of that, is that the right thing is being themselves in the best possible way. They have these social brains that do not work unless everyone around them is working too. So by cooperating and thinking of each other, they all benefit.

And so will He.

That is the main term of the agreement that He has with Father. His fate has always ridden on this. Play His part and when the day comes where these people are ready for the next stage, well He gets to play the good guy and She gets cast out to play the other part and learn the ropes.

If this game ends in stalemate and the board is wiped clean, well, He doesn’t want to consider how that one will pan out. Father is very big on the eternal and not being rushed, worse still, of late He has talked about a quieter and more simple life, often raising the possibility of a planet of dogs. Dogs, He says, are exemplars of love and companionship. He delights in waxing lyrical about dogs and chuckles at their name even being an anagram of…

He can see that it will all go to the dogs, eventually. Time is not on their side and they know it on so many levels. 

But do they care?

It seems not.

And to think that they were once considered mostly harmless.