The Price of Everything

When one lives as long as one should, one tends to learn many valuable lessons in life.

For unlike the horse or the bee, where within the first hour, a foal can already stand and the bee can already fly once it chews its way out of the cell. But a human does not. It is incapable of conveying coherent thought to the rest except through babble. And it is not equipped with the instincts for survival at all. It has to learn its lessons the hard way. Slow and steady. Taking twelve to fourteen years to reach maturity.

And one very valuable lesson that many knows not is the law of exchange. Everything on this terra firma has a price, my dear one. You of all should know that. Yes, everything has a price that must be paid for.

You upset the balance you pay. Some call it karma. Some call it retribution. It's called by a lot of names, all a subset of the whole. Retribution only points to negative events. Karma? Not enough either. It's just simply another version of the Eight Words of the Wiccan Rede: "An Ye Harm None, Do What Ye Will". Or the Three-fold Law of Wicca: " Mind the Three-fold Laws you should three times bad and three times good/When misfortune is enow wear the star upon your bro"

But none covers it as well as Hemingway's protagonist in The Sun Also Rises. For he says that in this world, there's a price for everything. Even for happiness. I bet you didn't get that, did you? Your happiness, your well-being, everything that you are enjoying, will be accounted for sooner or later.

That's what one calls balance.