The Mountain Is Hard Enough…a call for Compassion
We know how to come together when someone’s life is at stake. When there is a fire, a medical emergency or someone in immediate danger, people move. They arrive. They help.
Why, then, do we sometimes struggle so badly to live alongside one another when there is no emergency?
Hogsback is a beautiful mountain, but beauty does not make life easy. The weather can be harsh. We are remote. Doctors, shops and many everyday conveniences are far away. Some live without basic amenities. Others may have everything they need materially, yet still carry enormous emotional and mental burdens.
People stay for different reasons. Some love this place. Some call it home. Some have nowhere else to go. And as a community, we have survived a great deal.
Perhaps that is why consideration matters so much here.
Because conflict has become part of everyday life. Old grievances, suspicion, gossip, assumptions, alliances and personal battles have fractured relationships and destroyed trust. People have been hurt. People have walked away. Some wounds have lasted far longer than the arguments that created them.
And there is another uncomfortable truth. Sometimes even our good deeds can become a stage, an opportunity to be seen, praised or positioned in a certain light. That does not erase the help that was given, but it should make us question what truly motivates us.
Consideration asks something deeper.
It asks us to think before we speak, judge or react. To remember that we rarely know what another person is carrying. To understand that disagreement does not require cruelty, and accountability does not require humiliation.
There have been times when the consequences of how people are treated here have gone far beyond an argument. People have become deeply isolated and profoundly hurt. We cannot know what someone is carrying, or how much they have already endured before they cross our path.
That should make us stop.
We don’t have to like everyone. We don’t have to agree. We don’t have to tolerate harmful behaviour.
But do we really need to make another person’s life harder when we could choose not to?
When an emergency happens, we seem to remember that beneath our differences, we are human beings. Perhaps consideration is simply remembering that before the emergency arrives.
Because the mountain is already hard enough.
The weather is hard enough. The isolation is hard enough. Financial hardship is hard enough. Life itself is hard enough.
We should not become another hardship our neighbours have to survive.
Perhaps before we ask what is wrong with this community, we should each ask a harder question:
What am I adding to it?
Every word matters. Every choice matters. Every act of kindness matters. So does every act of cruelty.
The magic of this mountain will not be protected by its forests alone.
It will be protected when its people remember how to care for one another.
Contributed by Seeker of Magic