Quite often in my journey home, my heart found times to question my actions. I wondered if somewhere, way back, I’d made a wrong turn, to find myself in the world I’d now generated. I could clearly remember the times I’d turned left and not right, was silent when I had a voice to speak, or rested when I could have stayed awake. With every step down, which I took carefully in the darkening stairwell, I found those questions falling away like rain drops off windows. My heart felt warm and true, my bones and muscles felt strong and firm. With every step, my purpose was clearer, and though the path grew darker, light shone in my heart and mind.
At what seemed to be the bottom, there was no light. Stone carpeted the floor, and no sounds greeted my ears but that of the stale air echoing around me. The room must have been large, or at least stretched on somewhere. A part of me told me to stay put, like the feeling of waiting for someone else to catch up, but another part told me to take a leap of faith and press on.
I did the latter.
Before my foot could fully detach from the floor, flames burst in front of me upon torches on the walls. They did not startle me. I moved confidently through the room as if it were mine. My steps took me down a corridor turning left at the end, at which time my eyes were greeted by, as expected, the unexpected.
It would seem that the builder of the maze had laid links of rope about the ground. Despite the dark, 
dungeonesque surroundings, I found it quite necessary to keep my eyes where I walked.
Indeed, not once, but twice did my gaze hold too high for my feet to follow safe motions, and a trip or two resulted.
The funny thing about falling in a rope course? The ropes hold you up…
Besides the knotted situation below, I could hear drums beating further on. Accompanied by an increase in temperature, I felt as though I had on my first memory of a summer’s day, yet with no nature in sight. When not encountering the riggings at my ankles, I walked with long strides. I felt the starched cotton of my slacks slowly stick to my legs as I perspired. I was doing good, though the heat was stifling my breath. I felt a strength in my fingers, and my eyebrows furrowed slightly with every swing of my arms.
Within any confidence, like any good fighter will tell you, constant offensives will take away from defenses, and I never saw it coming until it was too late. As I managed to my feet once more, I looked in front of me and faced my opponent. His claws were sharp, and his eyes were as red as the torchlight around us. We grappled as I avoided his killing strokes. I threw him off my back, after prolonged wrestling, and he landed on his feet.
We locked eyes. We locked. Eyes. We. Locked. And in guaranteed displacements, the tiger fell apart.
Only prior experience had taught me this way to treat such a challenge, and certainly, not all challenges can be met with sheer reasoning.
Suddenly, the walls around me shattered, and I was left back in the grassy maze I’d once known well. The ground was dirt, the walls grass, and the sky a crisp shade of blue quite uniform like glass. In front of me was a table and chair. On the table was a book. I quickly realized I was at the center of the maze. I was home.
I approached the table slowly. The book was plain. A brown leather cover protected its pages, the table a rickety wooden one with a center support splitting to three legs even. The chair matched the table, and as suspected my weight cause it to creak gently, revealing its age. I took up the quill next to the book and dipped it in the ink just appeared. Opening the cover, I flipped through hundreds of blank pages.
Sitting back in my chair, I soon realized that my journey was my destination, and my only goal was to record it. A pass through life with the purpose of that pass alone. Fulfillment resides within the halls of legends, for there a life can ring on and ring true. I felt… a little disappointed. No fireworks? No grand finale? No long-lost love running to me to share my ending years with?
Suddenly, I threw open the book and wrote furiously. It was as if I had no choice, the words flying off my quill in a stream of conjured thought. I found quickly that the details I recalled were striking and vivid, and captured more than just my life, but the lessons weaved throughout it.
No, there were no fireworks or grand finale or long-lost love running to me. But there was this book, and this was where I was. There was this purpose, and this was where I was. Hoping for another ending, someone else’s ending wouldn’t make any sense, as this was my own and no one else’s. And my restlessness came to a close, as I wrote…
“The End.”
Life is a maze. I can’t tell you the way to go, I followed the path I found most true. I can tell you a few things I’ve noticed about the maze:
The maze isn’t just the standard lines and space between. The walls are not uniform. The paths are not replaceable or mistakable. You can know a good path from a bad one.
Essentially.
Keep following this path you’re on right now. Let me know how it’s going.
Mark this the last of Notes from inside the Maze.
Satisfied Fool 
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