The Tedium of Ambition

There is a land near an impossibly high mountain.  It is somewhere in a mountain range that goes back and back and up and up. No one knows how high and how far back it goes.  Every year the voice of God comes from the mountain, inviting all people to come up to Him.  None have come so far.  None are able to.  The people of that land usually do not venture into the range at all; they treat it with superstitious awe.

There is a certain group in that land who work hard and live plainly.  They are a religious people.  They pray to God, whose voice comes from the mountain.  They seem  less afraid of the mountains than most, but what they do there is not religious or spiritual or awe-inspiring.  It doesn’t seem worthy of the voice somehow, and so the other people of the land scorn them.  Specifically, they are doing stonework on the mountains.  They have cut very very broad stairs and ramps, that go about a 1000 feet up and a mile or so in.  At the end, there is a valley that they are currently clearing and leveling and terracing into a very large space, large enough for a town and villages and fields.

There was a young man there who grew tired of the daily grind of field and farm and holidays spent working on the stairs and the level space.  He heard the Voice of the mountain and wanted to ascend.  Yes, the stairs his folk made were symbolically about reaching God.  But he wanted to actually reach God.  So he joined a crew of bold men who dared!  They set out into the wastes, up into where the plants and animals were strange, up into the endless snows and silence.  The important thing was to try! Most died.  He barely made it back.

He tried again.  His ambition grew even greater.  This time he put more organization into it.    They had packs, they did preliminary expeditions to set up supply camps.  Again, most died.  They got much further, but they were not even close.  They did not even see the final peak.

His ambition grew even greater.  It was not enough now for him to see God.  He wanted everyone to go with him.

He went home.  He told his father, “I am ready now.”

His father took him to the elders.  They showed him their plans.  With telescopes and observations and other means they had calculated the final peak and determined how far and how high it would be to get there.  They had then determined where a base camp could be that would support everyone getting there.  Once they knew where the base camp would be, they had then calculated how many successive stages it would take for the folk to gradually relocate to the base camp, rebuilding their villages at each successive stage to the base camp each time so that the crops could acclimate and they could adjust to the new elevation and new climate.  They had then determined the infrastructure, the stairs and the ramps and the levels, they would need so that their people could do it, and indeed so that all the people in the whole land could come after.  This was what they were building.

It was an undertaking that would take generations.  It seemed barely possible.  It seemed superhuman in scale.

“When God told us to come up, then we at least knew what we were capable of,” the elders told the young man.

“The air grows very thin when you get very high up,” the young man said.  “I believe it gets even thinner, too thin to breathe.  Have you planned for that?”

The elders told him they did not have a solution yet.  They believed that either they would find one or, more likely, God would do miracles.  Because He had told them to come up.

“I have now found a work worthy of my ambition,” the young man said.  They made him an elder.  He returned to the fields and farms and stonework of his youth.