The Two Roads

It was New Year's Night. An aged man was standing by a window. He mournfully raised his eyes towards the deep blue sky, where the stars were floating like white lilies on the surface of a clear calm lake. Then he cast them on the Earth, where a few more helpless beings than himself were wandering on toward that inevitable goal—the tomb. Already he had passed sixty of the stages which led to it and had brought from his journey nothing but errors and remorse. His health was broken, his heart sorrowful, and his old age devoid of comfort.

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…with one despairing effort he cried aloud, “Oh youth return! Oh give me back my early days!”

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And his youth did return, for it had been a dream visiting his slumbers on this New Year's night. His errors only were no dream. He thanked God fervently that time was still his own and that he had not yet entered that deep, dark cavern where poison flowed instead of water and serpents hissed and crawled.

Alas! The “aged” man’s youth returned.

 

On this first night of the New Year, a tele-ported future was laid bare to him; the sudden impact of sixty years-worth of going down the wrong road hit him with a Holy Ghost-like fury.

 

Similar to the protagonist in The Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens, this man wept tears of shame, regret, and grief, longing to go back and make things right. And he did go back—though not as an old man who had seen the errors of his ways and who would, thenceforth, right all wrongs with the full vigor of Christian love and charity.

 

Instead, this “aged”-yet-still-young-man discovered he could back-track earlier in life to pick up the right road, thus sparing the world of the hurt and desolation he would otherwise spread throughout the greater part of his life. That is, he did not need to become a Scrooge who further debased himself and inflicted difficulties into the lives of others (such as on Morley, his former partner, and on the Cratchit family of Tiny Tim).

 

Compared to its Dickensian counterpart, the saving grace here is that earlier course correction voids those past and present harms that would otherwise be caused by an unregenerate person who continues on into a ripe old age.  

 

As such, then, this is a tale of a sooner accomplished redemption.

 

The surreal and ghostly transportation of Scrooge in The Christmas Carol might be a gift endowed by an All Merciful God to just a few incorrigibles. So don’t count on receiving this “grace at the encounter.” Better to correct one’s own errors and the sooner the better, as this morality tale, taught to me by my grandfather McGuire, finally intones us to do:  

Ye who still linger on the threshold of life, doubting which road to choose, remember that after years shall have passed and your feet have stumbled on the dark mountain, you will cry bitterly but cry in vain, “Oh youth return! Oh give me back my early days!”