The Years You Would Call Wasted

My seeker leaves the forest and becomes exactly what he despised. Rich, comfortable, a merchant, a gambler, a man of appetites. It lasts for years. I want to be clear that I did not write those years as a mistake.

He begins as an amused observer among the people he privately calls childlike, playing at their game because it costs him nothing. He is above it, and being above it is precisely what makes him vulnerable to it. You do not get pulled under by what you respect.

It takes him a long time to notice the change, because it happens at the speed at which nothing feels like it is happening. The contempt fades, then the detachment, then the discipline. One day he is simply one of them, and worse than them, because they never claimed otherwise.

And it brings him to disgust so complete that he goes to the river to end it. Only from there does anything open. Not from the forest, where he was admirable and stuck. From the bottom of the part of his life he would have been most ashamed to describe.

You have a stretch of years you file under wasted. I am not going to tell you they were secretly productive. I am telling you that no one arrives anywhere without them, and that the account of your life which skips them is not the true one.