<< Starting over/Slaying Giants

The Norse myth of creation foretells how in order to create the world; Odin, and his brothers had to slay the primordial giant: Ymir. 

Its destruction gave in turn an origin to the world and a future to the brothers. .

There’s deep symbolism on this. The breaking of chains, the breakdown of attachments or the reinvention of our personalities are seismic events that bring about loads of pain and suffering by eliminating these primordial substances that shape our life.

Sometimes at the crossroads of life we have to make choices that  imply extreme  sacrifices where we have to decide to forget who  we were, to simply  become something else. 

Some of these sacrifices are even scarier because they imply turning our back to all we know and it forces us to stare straight up to the future. We’re not very fond of uncertainty and yet in these situations, life tends to reward more handsomely new experiences and people who care about you and have acts of kindness that reassure you in a way that you never left home but rather that you just got back

And yet, as humans, when at our lowest; we can easily try to convince ourselves about alternative futures that never really existed, or paint realities that seem tainted with remorse and unproductive anger. 

This constitutes a complete lack of gratitude. Worse even, it can lead those around us to believe that we don’t love them on equal measure or seem dismissive of all their good actions. In these situations we have a moral responsibility; first to get back on our feet and second to be thankful once more.

For good or bad, once slayed; the primordial giant cannot be brought back. It is gone.  

We have the mountains and the sky instead, we have oceans and the valleys and all which make up our new life.

We can never know what the three brothers were thinking as they sat their eyes on the world they had created. Maybe there was in the end a shade of remorse in the slayment of the giant. Or maybe they struggled to understand why the only way to start a new life was to destroy the old one so completely. 

In the end the options continue to be one and the same: continue walking in this world you have created. Should you choose to make it happy or not, some decisions cannot be undone anway.

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