by Martin Anton Smith martinantonsmith@gmail.com
The Journey Of The Master’s Apprentice : Personalized Abysses & The Start of the Journey – Part 3 The Pain of Resting Too Long” (A Serialized Essay)
……continued from https://antonmartinsmith.com/2026/02/26/the-journey-of-the-masters-apprentice-part-2-personalized-abysses-the-start-of-the-journey/
A ‘eventually Bad’ thing can take the same look. When ‘beating your own path’ to find meaning – It’s annoying that it is not always obvious that your doing either the right or wrong thing. I was listening a a 50 year old writer who wrote for 29 years with no success, & then finally at age 50 it ‘suddenly all fell together’. He said that during that 29 years every ‘normal person’ thought he was an idiot for wasting his time. He won because he knew he was good & had a thing called ‘faith’. I think the Apprentice – to Master process is like this. A budding ‘Master’ of (something original) will probably usually be known as a failure to most around them.
For people on this journey (hopefully if of meaning, originality, Mastership) – perhaps after a decade or two of adulthood (if you are lucky or not forever willfully blind) you see that the trail has changed & looks less ‘abyss-ie’.
A quick surveillance as you look around shows that you have now arrived at a new location – the foothills of a hazed but surely very real, and at the least ‘partly beautiful’ towering distant mountain peak.
As you realized the improved conditions, you recognize you have ‘come a long way now’. But then you being an Apprentice (of Life) instead of a Master, you chose to celebrate and you tell yourself to take rest.
That’s what feels right. But there were risks in that decision. On this ‘celebrated rest’ you relaxed too much thinking you were enjoying yourself – that which is happening is of course the ‘Masters test’. For you don’t know it, but you’ve done something wrong by resting (too long) & psychologically celebrating too much.
The future Master-self (if you become one) who is looking on from the future, knows this is where you let your guard down (against Life’s tripwires).
The (future self) Master is watching you (as him/herself in the past) as a greenhorn Apprentice (of Life) making schoolboy/schoolgirl errors.
The future-self-Master see what the present ‘more foolish you’ has done – in choosing to ‘rest too long’ Apprentice-you has allowed a random unvetted element to sit beside you while you were resting.
While you patted yourself on the back about ‘how Far you’ve come’, some strange force came to distract you, perhaps it was a person pf a ‘collective of people’ that appeared in human form (common), but perhaps not (perhaps the destructive force was simply an obsession with electric guitars or a psychological addiction to cynicism etc.).
Because you as the Apprentice (of Life) only within the ‘adult game’ for perhaps ten to twenty five years, you have so much to learn yet to become literally ‘Masterful’.
In taking to rest & the distraction that was ‘served up’ while you were relaxing in the ‘rest area’, you lost sight of the main goal. You lost sight of the hazed covered mountaintops & the less beaten path that leads towards its peak.
So, of course in these conditions you are as the famed Roman border-guard-soldier who has over successive generations became en weakened to be casual about taking off his uncomfortable helmet while on guard/lookout duty. He is like most the other Roman guards of The Decline – he thinks to himself ‘it’s been quiet on the ‘hun invasion front’ I can relax a little”. He trusts the bad chatter in his mind, instead of being like Marcus Aurelius the stoic Roman Emperor who would dismiss the minds weak defeatist chatter with ease. That kind of creeping malaise they say is what really made the Roman Empire fall.
Thinking like that can make disaster easily strike just like an asp might strike someone ambling dreamily through the long grass on the savannah. The disaster bites, you are snapped out of you’re seemingly-always-getting-a-little-better-journey. Suddenly you’re rolling back downhill fast, tumbling, sweating, having no rest, losing parts of yourself piece by piece. That’s what they call in the vernacular a ‘rude awakening’.
Back to the Apprentice to Master journey from the abysmal beginning to the Masterful……
Anton Martin Smith Writer 