I've pushed this stone so many times before, I can't recall when it began, the climb. With youthful hands I grasped it, thought that from the shore of summit height, life would reveal its rhyme. But reaching top, it tumbles down once more— and waiting at the bottom, I begin. I start. I climb.

Now calloused are my palms, my shoulders worn, my knees know every pebble on the track. I've lost count of the times I've climbed at dusk and dawn, yet notice now: each time I understand the back- and-forth that lifts me up and brings me low— until you grasp that both are part of one unending flow.

They say a man grows wise as he grows old, but wisdom's only this: to know the stone won't lighten just because you've learned to re-behold its weight. It stays the same. But I am not the one I've known— I've become the path I walked, became the climb, the mountain in me, valley deep, the whole and endless time.

The young man thought the stone his enemy, his curse, a burden placed upon him by some cruel, cosmic hand. But decades teach what youth can't know: for better or for worse, this stone became my companion through the shifting sand of years. Its weight, my ballast. Its return, my constant friend. We're bound together now, until the very end.

I've watched the seasons turn while climbing up this slope, seen spring become to autumn, watched the light grow dim. Each decade stripped away another layer of my hope that things would change, that fate would soften on a whim. Yet losing hope, I found something deeper still— not resignation, no, but peace within the uphill.

And sometimes, standing at the base, I look up toward the peak, and smile. Not because it's easy, but because I finally see: the summit was illusion, distant blue, the high we seek— the life was in the pushing itself, the stumbling, this brief spree that we are given. The stone, it teaches me to rest: Not it that falls. I let it go. And walk toward it, blessed.