Slack the Line But Still Tethered

He was on a raft that was tethered to a dock on a great emerald shore. The lush landscape, like an eternal womb, provided nourishment, wisdom, plentiful goodness, anything the man needed to feel whole.

But the man always felt that something was lacking in his emerald paradise. Fear, danger, violence, uncertainty, all of those unpredictable occurrences of the vast ocean out "there," never bothered him on the land. 

If he wanted to encounter the challenges of the sea, all he had to do was slack the rope that tethered him to shore. The more slack he allowed, the choppier the water became and bit by bit he began to forget his emerald paradise. But the tether, no matter how much it frayed or got buried under the treasures he acquired on his seaward journeys, never frayed, and though the man knew not the following fact, it snapping and disconnecting him from his pure land was a physical impossibility no different than the law of gravity one day switching off at the snap of one's fingers.

And so the man continued to slack the line and venture out into stormy seas because the game of life that swung like a pendulum from fear to courage, hate to love, was the right of all people descended from the emerald land of paradise. And every so often the man would close his eyes and breathe softly and purely and some part of him, not his mind per se, would glimpse his homeland and blush at the feeling of peace and tranquility that it gave him, even from so very far away.