If you hold a cat by the tail.

Someone I know was telling me about someone they know who believes that all things learned should be self-taught. The only things worth being educated on are those you do yourself. Learning through doing, the only way to be taught. Experience. That most brutal of teachers, as someone else has once said.

But there is instead a person, the quietest, who deigns to avoid such brutality. This one sits in a comfortable, aged chair with a warm mug, listening to every story told about activities never personally partaken. These stories and their secondhand characters, gathered only through such tales, are the ones come to love or loath, who are emulated, who are repaired. Watching the lives of others swirl in a swift vividness, never noticing the passing of his own sun or the changing of his own moon. All of what he learns comes through thoughts and imagery, from hearing others' events, shouts beyond his walls, and wondering at how he himself would act while never doing so. Such a wondering, it is supposed, determines his outlook in case of application. This is a person who sits still, skin grown taught with inactivity, but feels a weathering windburn to have travelled lifetimes. Feeling without doing, but a life, the same vehicle, permitting such similar brutality.

Here, perhaps, whether one does or does not makes no matter. What comes will come as it may. Perhaps, perhaps, that person there, sitting secure, should stand and step into that what is coming. Its waves are breaching nonetheless. That step may be an entrance into a fatality or into a rejuvenation, where both might ease the creak in those bones. To be wondering in the dark keeps them creaking all the more.