Genesis 19:19 · World English Bible
See now, your servant has found favor in your sight, and you have magnified your loving kindness, which you have shown to me in saving my life. I can’t escape to the mountain, lest evil overtake me, and I die.
A man will bargain his own rescue down to fit a fear he has never gone and looked at. A conclusion never once checked feels exactly like knowledge, and that certainty sets the state, the state sets the size of what a man dares ask for, and the ask sets the size of the rescue he ends up living in.
From the Self-Help reading below.
The same verse, read by one tradition.
SELF-HELP
A man will bargain his own rescue down to fit a fear he has never gone and looked at.
A conclusion never once checked feels exactly like knowledge, and that certainty sets the state, the state sets the size of what a man dares ask for, and the ask sets the size of the rescue he ends up living in. The loving kindness already shown him could have carried him anywhere; his estimate of that mountain cut the deliverance down to a nearer, smaller town.
He ends up on that high ground regardless, pushed there by a newer fear, which means the death he predicted was never real, only unexamined. He had no reference for dying up there, only a picture of it, and the picture governed the choice. The cost of that is a life negotiated down to the size of a guess, while the strength that had already saved him stood ready for the harder road.
Self-Help lens
Where have I settled for less because of something I only imagined?
Seneca wrote that we suffer more in imagination than in reality, and that most of what we dread we have never once walked up to and examined. Fear grows enormous precisely because it is never inspected.
The first arrow is the hard thing that actually happens. The second is the story we tell ourselves about it, and that one we fire at ourselves, often about something that never arrives.
Epictetus taught that people are disturbed not by events but by their judgments about events. Inspect the judgment and the mountain you refused shrinks back to its real size.
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Self-Help