The Fifty-First Dragon

"Lord Frith, I know you've looked after us well, and it's wrong to ask even more of you. But my people are in terrible danger, and so I would like to make a bargain with you. My life in return for theirs." and Frith replied "There is not a day or night that a doe offers her life for her kittens, or some honest captain of Owsla, his life for his chief. But there is no bargain: what is, is what must be."

From Watership Down, by Richard Adams

There was a point about ten years ago where I was certain - and for less glorious and noble reasons than Hazel - that my life was worth more dead than alive. More along the lines of Jimmy Stewart in "It's a wonderful life", I was certain the payout from my insurance was a better thing for the world than me being in it. I could not have been more wrong.

The fact of the matter is that with few exceptions we're all better off here. Sure, there are instances where people give their lives to save many others. They're rare, I'm venturing. But though I have used this quote at different times for different inspirational purposes, the meaning is the same: Go, get it done.

It's been a long time since I read the book but I am told this is the last time Frith talks to Hazel - or any of the rabbits, ever again. He's done helping them. What a poignant last message, then. "Here, Hazel, you're in charge. It's all on you."

No pressure!

I went through rehab and was told there are no atheists in rehab. I'm still an atheist and this quote, ironically, is part of the reason. Sitting and asking for favors from an imaginary friend and the books written by countless people who tried to record the myriad and conflicting ideas he offered us to cope in a world he didn't make or understand was going to do me nothing. Asking gods for the rockets to stop, for the pain to go away, for the past to be erased - is pointless.

Instead I reached to a book about a bunch of rabbits who cross England looking for a better place to live. At the climax of the book they are beset by another group of rabbits intent on killing them all when their leader, Hazel, hatches a plan. If Hazel can just make it to where there is a dog, tied up at a nearby farm - if they can chew through his collar and out run him up the hill to where the enemies are gathered and if they can get the dog to attack them - they just might make it.

On his way down to the farm he asks his god for this one favor. Look, is it really that much? I'm in a real bind here... I know you can do this - at least I think you can and it SEEMS like you have before. Can you help a brother out? I'll gladly pay for this with my life. Deal?

No, in short, is the answer. Not much more is needed, really, but what it means is one of the most beautiful things I have ever realized: You got this. Go, get it done.

Hazel had been doing it all along - without help from Frith. Hazel and his lovable musclehead friend Bigwig - who, in any macho-shithead telling of the story would have been the leader - got their warren out of one danger, through many other trials, and finally through this one battle - with Bigwig as lieutenant to Hazel. (Another inspiring moment in the book is when the leader of the attacking warren, Woundwort is aghast at the idea of  Bigwig not being the leader of Hazel's...how could it be that the physically strongest one is not the leader?).

And here he is, challenged one more time. He's tired. He wants a favor. And in this conversation he realizes all along that they, down there on earth, had been getting it done all along. Frith be damned!

I slayed the fifty-first dragon and lived to tell about it, and that has made all the difference.  Because fifty-two, and fifty-three, and so on, are right behind him.