The Man On The Mountain

A Poem About Choice

I felt this piece spoke to the “Damned if you do, damned if you don’t” nature of our twenty-first century world.

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I climbed up a mountain to watch the sunrise and found a small man in meditation.

I asked the man, “Why do you sit here alone at the top of the mountain?”

And the man said to me

That he realized every choice he ever made would inevitably kill someone.

Sometimes it’s obvious,

You hit someone too hard in the head and they die

And sometimes it’s you,

Your death is the consequence of your own actions

And sometimes it’s very far away,

So you can never know the results of even a good deed.

You can help a man get to work on time

For his regular shift as a bus driver

During which he makes decisions

That end the lives of his passengers

When the replacement bus driver would not have made

Those very same decisions

Sparing the innocent passenger’s souls

From the recklessness of reality.

You can never know the consequences

Of even the kindest of gestures

But guaranteed,

Whenever you make a decision,

The outcome will always lead to someone’s death.

This was the truth he was taught by life.

The man says he made one final choice

To sit on the mountain and meditate

To protect others from being his victims

As long as he sits in meditation,

Within the stillness of his inaction

He can live with a moral and guilt-free conscious

He can save the world from his decisions

And he realized this when he was no older than I

So he climbed up this mountain many,

Many years ago.

For forty seven years he sat silently saving lives

From suffering the consequences of his personal decisions

Here at the peak of the mountain where he meditates on top of the world.

So I asked the man,

I have heard that every moment is an opportunity to turn your life around.

Are you not making a new choice every moment

You choose to remain here at the top of this mountain?

Then the blustering winds howled in dismay

Singing of the truth they had whispered all along

And the sun broke above the grinning horizon

Illuminating the face of the meditating man

I watched whole lives blink behind his tired eyes

I saw the blade of enlightenment cut into his mind

We sat on the mountain top, the old meditating man and I

And he wept tears of wisdom

While I watched the sunrise.

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Author’s note: Hey there! Seb here! I just wanted to thank you for choosing to spend your time reading my work. It means the world to little old me, to know that out of the darkness of our experiences we can form real human connections and investigate subjects that are profoundly filled with pain and beauty. Your support means a lot and I am honored that you put your belief in me to entertain you.

Thank you.

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If this resonated with you, here are some more poems by Sincerely Seb:

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© 2025 Sebastian Arends | Sincerely Seb. All Rights Reserved

Unauthorized use, reproduction, or distribution of any part of this poem or accompanying image is prohibited without permission from the author. No generative artificial intelligence (AI) was used in the writing of this work. The author expressly prohibits any entity from using this publication for purposes of training AI technologies.

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