There are moments, of course, where no story can be told without pain, and when that happens there are three choices:
- Tell the story anyway, and let the pain season the tale as it will.
- Tell a story about something else related to that moment – the light through a window, or how a sword was earned, or the quality of the body’s arrangement on the slab.
- Tell no story at all, now, and instead sit and observe, or comfort others, or leave.
There is a wisdom in each, in pushing through and in dancing around and in enduring, but know that others will tell their own stories about that choice. If you can, strive to be as unbothered by those stories as the one whose story you do or do not tell today.
And remember, if you can, that all stories end (though moments of them may be timeless) but story is eternal, and there will always be time to tell the one that’s most needed. Even if, someday, you won’t be the one telling the story.