Fight the long defeat.
“Together throughout the ages of the world we have fought the long defeat.”
With these words, Lady Galadriel (Lord of the Rings) seems to set the scene for the condition of our world.
A world where we are born into a life that seems to be but a long defeat. Where striving can, at times, feel futile.
We feel like Sisyphus, the character in Greek mythology who is condemned to live a loop of pushing a boulder uphill, only to reach the top and watch the rock barrel back to the bottom.
We grow weary and wonder, “what’s the point? Why continue on if it ends in defeat?”
In LoTR, Tolkien supplies his answer in the acts of countless characters. Consider Boromir, who charges into certain death to save two lowly hobbits. Or Gandalf, who wrestles a death-dealing demon so the fellowship can flee the mines of Moria.
Each decide that the right thing to do is to choose hope and give final victory a fighting chance. Testaments to the idea that perhaps there is something that stands outside time—the true, good, and beautiful—that waits to greet the faithful warrior with a warm embrace and a “well done.”
The answer, then, to why continue, being “because to fight is to have hope.” To follow Lady Galadriel’s lead and fight the long defeat, is to see yourself like Gandalf: a shepherd of the beautiful.
A guardian of the good that finds strength to fight on in the face of futility with the reminder that “all worthy things that are in peril as the world now stands, those are in my care. And for my part, I shall not wholly fail of my task, though [things] should perish, if anything passes through this night that can still grow fair or bear fruit and flower again in the days to come.”
In continuing to show up, we supply the hope we once found wanting, setting an example to all that, no matter how dark the depths of death and despair, there is something in us that is greater. That “no matter how hard the world pushes against [us], within [us], there’s something stronger—something better, pushing right back.”
As that something stronger in us flickers, we gesture upward toward the source of our hope. We do our part to preserve the light. And that, to me, is enough.