A Long Walk Home
When a child is taught that fiction is truth, villains are heroes, abuse is love, and violence is communication, they inherit a lifelong struggle to find their place in this world.
A Long Walk Home shares the struggle to live a worthwhile life in the shadows of the lessons of childhood. The survivor’s journey is learning to manage the wounds of the past while consciously paving a new way into the future. Scars never truly heal, but there is hope.
Excerpts From A Long Walk Home
Love is the realization the other person is as real as you are. Love is the realization the other person is vulnerable, and they’ve trusted you to protect their vulnerability. That’s it. Everything else is a distraction. The key to life is not to simply find someone and grow old together. How sad and melancholy that is. The key to life is to stay a kid. To joyfully fight against the tide. A tide that eventually knocks you down and sweeps you away, but until then who cares? The goal is to find someone who wants to enjoy the rising tide with you. We resonate within the context of the lives we’ve lived… Everyone deserves one person who asks if they are okay. Everyone deserves to matter to someone.
Nils’ middle brother was a lost soul. In the bookcase in the living room above the rocking chair that replaced a smashed Christmas gift, there’s a blurry picture of Daniel that sums up his essence. Maybe 1957, when he was three, certainly not much older than that. He’s a chubby little kid sitting on a tricycle. His Davy Crockett tee shirt stretched over his baby fat, eyes closed as he looks heavenward, smiling the smile of an innocent loving his life. Daniel always loved Westerns. He is soft and gentle, living in a world that would become too ugly for him. The spiritual joy in his face transcends the world he was about to inherit through the happenstance of his birth. Violence begets violence or empathy, but in violence empathy must be hidden away lest it get exploited. Nils watched the world around him and figured out how to stuff all of his softness away, but Daniel struggled with that, so he eventually learned to kill it off completely.