The Companions

I could not have planned my journey. Not any particular journey to a town or a region, but the journey of my life, the road I’ve walked from my earliest days. I’ve often heard people remark that they have no regrets about choices they’ve made because the results of those choices have made them who they are.

I can’t say that I agree fully with such sentiments, but I certainly understand them. Hindsight is easy, but decisions made in the moment are often much more difficult, the “right” choice often much harder to discern.

Which circles me back to my original thought: I could not have planned out this journey I have taken, these decades of winding roads and unexpected twists and turns. Even on those occasions when I purposely strode in a determined direction, as when I walked out of Menzoberranzan, I could not begin to understand the long-term ramifications of my choice. Indeed on that occasion, I thought that I would likely meet my death, and soon enough. It wasn’t a suicidal choice, of course-never that! — but merely a decision that the long odds were worth the gamble when weighed against the certainty of life in Menzoberranzan, which seemed to me emotional suicide.

Never did I think those first steps would lead me out of the Underdark to the surface world. And even when that course became evident, I could not have foreseen the journeys that lay ahead-the love of Montolio, and then the home and family I found in Icewind Dale. On that day I walked away from Menzoberranzan, the suggestion that my best friend would be a dwarf and I would marry a human would have elicited a perplexed and incredulous look indeed!

Imagine Drizzt Do’Urden of Daermon N’a’shezbaernon sitting at the right hand of King Bruenor Battlehammer of Mithral Hall, fighting beside King Bruenor against the raiding drow of Menzoberranzan! Preposterous!

But true.

This is life, an adventure too intricate, too interconnected to too many variables to be predictable. So many people try to outline and determine their path, rigidly unbending, and for them I have naught but a sigh of pity. They set the goal and chase it to the exclusion of all else. They see the mark of some imagined finish line and never glance left or right in their singular pursuit.

There is only one certain goal in life: death.

It is right and necessary and important to set goals and chase them. But to do so singularly, particularly regarding those roads which will take many months, even years, to accomplish is to miss the bigger point. It is the journey that is important, for it is the sum of all those journeys, planned or unexpected, that makes us who we are. If you see life as a journey to death, if you truly understand that ultimate goal, then it is the present that becomes most important, and when the present takes precedence above the future, you have truly learned to in the general di Lord Ulfbind