How to be saved

But what was “saved”? . . . Well, “saved” might be to learn to bear what happens to you. Because how you bear it is more important than what it is. To line up the unchangeable amid constant change. To protect your freedom with a certain amount of discipline, the way a rancher fences in his grazing lands. To mark your pivots through the abyss, and (order being heaven’s first law) run a course of action through the formless void. But because the biggest part of the entire universe of space and time can never be apprehended by direct, first-hand experience, you’ve got to get at it in other ways, he said. By such as the mechanism of Wyandra’s perception and her memory, and by books. But books that give rise to something, like a steam engine produces steam.
     From Variation West