These phrases make me wonder: if these people using these phrases went on a hike, would the terms switch? Do they say uphill is easy because they have never experienced the abject, gritty misery of an unrelenting climb? Do they view the word "downhill" as a descent into ruin because they haven't ever sprinted down a mountainside, allowing their weight to throw them into momentum, wind gloriously pelting them in the face?
Metaphorically, these descriptors make sense. It's fairly well-recognized that mountaintops are better than their corresponding valleys. However, the respective aesthetic experiences on the journeys don't match up to their destinations.
Perhaps this provides some insight into the nature of spiritual journey - while the trail of a Christ follower is steep and treacherous, all of its strain and exhaustion pales in comparison to the glory of the peak. And likewise, the downhill run of one succumbing to temptation is easier and feels much more natural, but eventually slows to a halt at the very bottom of the valley.
“Son,'he said,' ye cannot in your present state understand eternity...That is what mortals misunderstand. They say of some temporal suffering, "No future bliss can make up for it," not knowing that Heaven, once attained, will work backwards and turn even that agony into a glory. And of some sinful pleasure they say "Let me have but this and I'll take the consequences": little dreaming how damnation will spread back and back into their past and contaminate the pleasure of the sin. Both processes begin even before death. The good man's past begins to change so that his forgiven sins and remembered sorrows take on the quality of Heaven: the bad man's past already conforms to his badness and is filled only with dreariness. And that is why...the Blessed will say "We have never lived anywhere except in Heaven, : and the Lost, "We were always in Hell." And both will speak truly.”
- C. S. Lewis, The Great Divorce
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