‘Keep all your promises, no matter how small. Sometimes, like the pebble that brings the avalanche, something tiny can prove to be of immense power.‘
– Riamfada, to Connavar, Sword In The Storm
‘Keep all your promises, no matter how small. Sometimes, like the pebble that brings the avalanche, something tiny can prove to be of immense power.‘
– Riamfada, to Connavar, Sword In The Storm
I like this week’s pearl (of wisdom) very much, I think because it’s something I have myself thought to be important and tried to uphold through my life.
I see holding to promises as important in creating and sustaining fibrous strength – moral fibre? – both in myself and, collectively, in the world.
For me it’s part of building and maintaining integrity, and integrity keeps our channels open and unblocked, so that light and energy of life can keep flowing.
Hmm, now I’d better take some time to reflect on the promises I haven’t been able to keep.
Actually, I realize that I have focused on promises as a holding operation, but that the Gemmell quotation emphasizes a more expansive, fertile kind of power that can come from promises we keep. That reminds me of those fairy stories where the hero or heroine takes time to be kind to an animal or a poor person they meet on their way, and then it turns out later that that animal or person is magically able to help them at exactly the right moment.
Very interesting. The promise which Connovar breaks has terrible consequences, and I have always read it that way. But here, as you say, it feels expansive, and I am left wondering more than I have before what would have happened to Connovar if he had kept that promise.
And, it is quite a Gemmellian idea to consider the pebble that starts the avalanche, in both good and bad ways.