As I stumble along in the twilight zone near the end of my journey through life, a few lingering questions continue to cloud my inner vision. Others have spoken or written about leaving a legacy in that space between date born and date of death. Have I done my best in this world that others care about? Have I spoken out against injustices often enough? There is no evidence that those who follow have any inclination to carry that torch onward. I have written of my poverty, and other personal challenges, that I overcame. But no two persons have met with the same challenges, nor have they listened with much interest to my tales. And why should they? Like it or not, they have their own struggles. I do not attract great throngs of listeners, nor a wide readership of my thoughts. I have no connection to others that gives me special passage to help them learn, to grow, or to follow their paths toward enlightenment while overcoming a host of man-made obstacles. Survival is not an achievement. It is a common motivator that others do not want to hear about. They don’t need to be reminded when they  are hungry, or tired, or when they come down with an illness. Self-respect, achievement, and self-transcendence also are not welcoming topics to others to be tapped concurrently with finding their footing on the lower rungs of the ladders of life. Yes, the advantages flow most profusely to the already advantaged. Yet they, too, have their moral challenges.

Perhaps each of us has an epiphany awaiting somewhere in our treks through life. I’ve had a few. Did they arise from a mystical force? Did I suddenly realize that I needed to change my behaviors, and get on the path in alignment with my personal destiny? Yes. That seems the most likely explanation for many of us. Medical journals say that we each are unique from the very beginning when our earliest lifeforms must swim a fight for life against 50 million others just to attach ourselves to our mother’s life support system to become the sole survival. Was that our first test known as the “survival of the fittest?” It is nevertheless hard to determine if that was a winning or a losing contest of wills.

Life comes at us in episodes of feast and famine, right or wrong, sometimes in the form of a crossroad. Most of us seem to know intuitively about which road to take as if our choices were illuminated for us by a guardian angel. Adolf Hitler wrote of his struggles, but not about the wisdom of his choices. Perhaps the same can be said for every tyrant who ever lived. Still, bad choices are made by nearly all of us, not just the tyrants. It takes a reserve of determination—and something more—to pull through a wrong decision. Some do it with ease, others do not. What is it that separates the two groups?

I have not lived a good life, a satisfying life. That is why I often proclaim that I am not a preacher. There is no satisfaction in watching the third, or fifth, or tenth best candidate win an election to a position of high authority, and then watch our principles and our honor get trampled for the next 10 or 20 years. The lust for power and the lust for greed seem to be perfectly joined in wedded infamy. How easy it is to get sucked down that rabbit hole. Clearly, we do not speak with enough clarity to prevent those two impostors with the urgency needed to separate them at the core.

I am inevitably drawn back to the metaphor of an inclined plane, much like a treadmill, in which we each must carry a load that always tires us. But we dare not rest. When we do we are pulled backward against our will, and we must double down and expend much more energy just to get back to our former place. And then with or without a warning, the treadmill jams, and our journey has ended. Was it worth the effort to find we ended almost exactly where we started? The answer I think is “yes,” but only if we have an empty tank of energy and nothing more to give.