[Elynne] Sense and Sensibility
((This journal started life as an almanac crossed with a schedule planner, crammed with notes about weather, crops, the care and treatment of humans and animals. The writing is as small and densely packed as possible, to get as much information into each page as possible. Many of the pages are stained and dog-eared. After a single blank page, the entries in the blank book change completely; the work diary ends abruptly, and becomes a personal journal. No userpic yet, but probably will have one soonish.))
Katarine kept this for me... in case I came back someday, she said. She gave it to me before the final evacuation, and dissapeared. So many of the people I knew are gone.
I have always almost always been a sensible person, and this book is a testament to that. I was a good, sensible druid. I walked from town to town, farmstead to farmstead, doing what I could, giving what advice I could, trying to get the dung-headed yokels to understand concepts like crop rotations and not breeding their cows to death. That was our job. Most of the time it was boring, frustrating, tedious, exhausting, and deeply depressing. There were good moments, and I kept reminding myself that I was making a positive difference... and then there would be the occasional tiny backwards hovel where the people had decided that druids were evil, somehow, that we were causing the plagues and famines, and then I'd have to use my tricks to get out before they caught me. Or try to save one of my colleagues who hadn't made it out... but always sensible, always safe.
I was even sensible about joining the resistance. I'd heard about it from some of the other druids. We were the ones who worked with the results of Greymane's ridiculous blockade every day, we were the ones with the almanacs and journals charting the inevitable decline of our nation. Not just the people starving... the stagnation, the pride turning to raving jingoism, the insularity that made ignorance fester and spread worse than any plague. We needed help. We needed to get out. We could have done it on our own terms, if Greymane had
Well. We tried, we were going to fix things, and we failed. Whether we would have won or not is a matter for armchair historians to debate. What actually happened was--Deathwing, and the Forsaken. And the worgen "curse." Which for me was a blessing--best thing to have ever happened to me.
There's nothing wrong with being sensible, in moderation. I've played it safe almost my whole life. This situation... I know the only sensible thing to do is walk away, wash my hands of everything, pretend it never happened. It's a mess, and it's very likely to end up with me getting killed, in any one of a variety of horrible ways. And worse: I'm likely to screw up and get myself killed if I don't get a grip on what's going on, and figure it out fast.
But one of the things I don't understand is why I can't do that. Why do I care so much? Why can't I just walk away? Well, I could, of course--but I very much do not want to. And I don't know why.
I hate not knowing why. Not understanding the workings of my own mind is... dangerous. I had to learn mental organization and discipline to do my job as a druid; I had to learn self-control at a depth I'd never imagined existed to drag myself out of the mindless beast-state, along with Krennan's potions. Is it just that I've finally gotten fed up with being sensible, and I'm throwing myself at this crazy situation in a desperate bid to be unpredictably stupid?
I'm going to need to think about this quite a bit more.
Katarine kept this for me... in case I came back someday, she said. She gave it to me before the final evacuation, and dissapeared. So many of the people I knew are gone.
I have always almost always been a sensible person, and this book is a testament to that. I was a good, sensible druid. I walked from town to town, farmstead to farmstead, doing what I could, giving what advice I could, trying to get the dung-headed yokels to understand concepts like crop rotations and not breeding their cows to death. That was our job. Most of the time it was boring, frustrating, tedious, exhausting, and deeply depressing. There were good moments, and I kept reminding myself that I was making a positive difference... and then there would be the occasional tiny backwards hovel where the people had decided that druids were evil, somehow, that we were causing the plagues and famines, and then I'd have to use my tricks to get out before they caught me. Or try to save one of my colleagues who hadn't made it out... but always sensible, always safe.
I was even sensible about joining the resistance. I'd heard about it from some of the other druids. We were the ones who worked with the results of Greymane's ridiculous blockade every day, we were the ones with the almanacs and journals charting the inevitable decline of our nation. Not just the people starving... the stagnation, the pride turning to raving jingoism, the insularity that made ignorance fester and spread worse than any plague. We needed help. We needed to get out. We could have done it on our own terms, if Greymane had
Well. We tried, we were going to fix things, and we failed. Whether we would have won or not is a matter for armchair historians to debate. What actually happened was--Deathwing, and the Forsaken. And the worgen "curse." Which for me was a blessing--best thing to have ever happened to me.
There's nothing wrong with being sensible, in moderation. I've played it safe almost my whole life. This situation... I know the only sensible thing to do is walk away, wash my hands of everything, pretend it never happened. It's a mess, and it's very likely to end up with me getting killed, in any one of a variety of horrible ways. And worse: I'm likely to screw up and get myself killed if I don't get a grip on what's going on, and figure it out fast.
But one of the things I don't understand is why I can't do that. Why do I care so much? Why can't I just walk away? Well, I could, of course--but I very much do not want to. And I don't know why.
I hate not knowing why. Not understanding the workings of my own mind is... dangerous. I had to learn mental organization and discipline to do my job as a druid; I had to learn self-control at a depth I'd never imagined existed to drag myself out of the mindless beast-state, along with Krennan's potions. Is it just that I've finally gotten fed up with being sensible, and I'm throwing myself at this crazy situation in a desperate bid to be unpredictably stupid?
I'm going to need to think about this quite a bit more.