Alignment (After Mercy)
I had a coach once who, on a phone call, told me to get off the line immediately.
I was confused.
He said,
“Don’t get on the phone with me unaligned.
Don’t get on the phone with me unregulated.
Get aligned first. Then call me.”
He was right.
When you’re upset, agitated, scared, distracted — everything you do from that state is distorted.
But when you’re calm, breathing deeply, relaxed, open — things simply work better.
You can feel the difference.
But alignment is more than just feeling good.
There’s a deeper version of it — one that requires the ego to loosen its grip.
By the end of Saving Private Ryan, something important happens with Upham that most people miss.
He doesn’t die.
That matters.
Upham argues for mercy early in the film from fear and idealism.
That mercy collapses.
It costs a man his life.
Upham freezes — and lives with the shame.
But later, after the freeze and the humiliation, Upham encounters the same man again.
This time, he doesn’t freeze.
He doesn’t rage.
He doesn’t posture.
He doesn’t explain himself.
He calmly raises his rifle and kills him.
Then something stranger still happens.
The other German soldiers put their hands up.
They expect to die.
Upham lets them go.
And then he walks away.
Alive.
This isn’t heroic death.
It isn’t redemption through sacrifice.
It’s initiation through survival.
Upham has to live with:
the freeze
the shame
the killing
the mercy
the clarity
No one absolves him.
No one celebrates him.
He simply carries it.
And that matters — because Northern Courage is not about dying well to escape shame.
It’s about living with what you’ve done
and who you’ve become.
This is where Frodo belongs in the story too.
Frodo spares Gollum not because he believes it will end happily.
Not because he’s sentimental.
But because he understands corruption from the inside.
He knows the cost.
He accepts it.
And in the end, Frodo doesn’t get the Shire back.
He saves the world —
and still cannot stay.
Mercy doesn’t reward him.
It wounds him.
And then there’s Aragorn.
In the books, Aragorn never doubts who he is.
He never wonders whether he will be king.
There is no identity crisis.
There is only timing.
Aragorn doesn’t act from fear, pity, or self-redemption.
He acts from alignment.
He sees the path.
He submits to it.
Not because it feels good.
Not because it guarantees peace.
Not because it saves him.
But because it is true.
That’s the integrated man.
Not the one who avoids harm.
Not the one who dies cleanly.
But the one who no longer needs justification.
He forgives where forgiveness frees his heart.
He shows mercy where mercy is aligned.
He sets boundaries where boundaries are required.
And he moves forward —
not to be good,
not to be saved,
but because misalignment would cost him more than any consequence.
That’s where this arc has been pointing.
And here’s the difficult truth:
Alignment is always available —
but standing between it and us
is us.
Our ego.
Our fear.
Our desire to be right.
Our attachment to identity.
To reach alignment, something has to die.
That’s why we don’t witness Aragorn’s inner death on the page — it happened long before the story begins.
But we do witness it in Upham.
We see the collapse of his ego in the freeze.
And later, we see its replacement — not with bravado, but with right action.
Clean. Calm. Unargued.
To reach alignment, we must pass through a death-and-rebirth of the self.
Because it is the self — not fate — that blocks the path.
Tomorrow, I’ll share a simple, embodied practice
for finding alignment again
when life knocks you sideways.