There was a place my daughter had always wanted to see.

So this summer, we made the trip.

We swam in the cold, clear lake at Zurich. We climbed into the mountains — Grindelwald, Mürren, the valley at Lauterbrunnen, where the waterfalls fall so far they turn to mist before they land.

Watching my daughter take it in, a graduate degree behind her, a whole career still in front of her, was its own kind of joy.

And on an ordinary afternoon in Lucerne, partway through the trip, we came upon a small park with a pond, and a wall of stone rising behind it.

I had expected a statue. Something standing. Something proud.

What I found was carved into the rock itself.

A dying lion. Ten meters of sandstone, cut straight into the face of an old quarry wall. A broken spear rests between his ribs. One heavy paw lies across a shield he is still, even now, trying to protect.

His face holds no ferocity at all.

It holds grief.

I stood there far longer than I meant to.

More than a century ago, Mark Twain stood in the same spot and called it "the most mournful and moving piece of stone in the world."

He was right. I felt it before I understood any of it.

So I looked it up. Right there, phone in my hand, in front of the stone. And what I read followed me through the rest of the trip.

Loyal to What

The Lion mourns the Swiss Guards.

They were Swiss soldiers in the service of the French king; mercenaries, sworn by contract to a crown that was not their own.

On the 10th of August, 1792, a revolution came for the Tuileries Palace in Paris. The Guards held the great staircase and fought to defend it.

Here is the part I can't get out of my head.

The king had already fled. He and his family had slipped away to shelter with the Assembly. And from safety, he sent word for the Guards to lay down their arms.

They were overrun before the order could reach them in time. The monument records the number in Roman numerals: seven hundred and sixty dead.

They died defending an empty palace, for a king who was no longer in it, in a fight that was never theirs to begin with.

The words carved above the Lion honor them plainly: To the loyalty and bravery of the Swiss.

Loyalty. Bravery. Two things we're raised to admire.

And standing there, what I felt was not admiration. It was closer to grief.

Because loyalty, it turns out, is a dependent virtue.

It's worth exactly as much as the thing you give it to, and not a bit more.

Its whole value hangs on the question no one teaches you to ask: who are you handing it to, and would they ever hand it back?

Closer to Home

The stone is two hundred years old.

I walked out of that park thinking about how quietly a modern version of it plays out in the rest of us.

We give our loyalty every single day. To the work. To the people. To the person we once decided we were going to be. We give it out of habit, out of love, out of a quiet belief that giving it is simply what good people do.

And we rarely stop to ask the two questions that matter most.
Who is actually holding that precious loyalty. And what it is costing us to keep it there.

Once I started asking, I couldn't stop seeing it.

The job you pour your best years into, first in, last out, the one everyone leans on, still believing them every time they tell you your time is coming.

The relationship you keep showing up for, giving and giving, because leaving would feel like admitting the years didn't count.

The friend you always answer for, who only ever seems to call when they need something.

We call all of it honorable. And it is, it takes something rare to hold a post when holding it is hard.

But the Guards weren't foolish. They were brave people keeping a promise. That is exactly what makes the stone so hard to look away from.

Everything strong in them, their courage, their discipline, their honor, spent defending a king who had already saved himself and left them behind.

Setting Down the Shield

So the question is not whether to be loyal.

Loyalty is a virtue worth keeping. Give it up and you lose something essential about yourself.

The question is quieter, and harder. Where have you aimed it, and would that thing ever lie down and die for you?

If the answer is one you already sense, you're allowed to know it.

And you're allowed to set the shield down. Not in anger. With gratitude for what it gave you, and a clear sense that the years ahead deserve a better cause than the years behind.

You can honor where you've been and still choose differently about where you go.

Because the finest thing you can do with a loyalty this strong is give it to something, or someone, worth guarding.

Maybe that's right where you're standing. Maybe it's somewhere you haven't let yourself look yet.

Either way, the honest thing is to ask. To stand in front of your own life the way I stood in front of that stone, and see it as it actually is.

My daughter is at the beginning of hers.

Wherever you are in yours, it isn't too late.

It is never too late to give your loyalty to something that gives it back.

This September, I'm going to ask for a little of yours.

My first novel, Leadership at the Dinner Table, is almost here.
Join the waitlist today!

With Absolute Sincerity,

Ed Clementi,

Founder & CEO of Inspired Fire, LLC

Make an Impact and Feel an Impact!