The edge is a funny place.
From it you can see your entire life stretching away from you, back and forth and all to the sides and up and down. You stand on the precipice of possibility. You wait for something to push you over — to the future? To the past? To dimensions untraveled, unknown?
What if you decide to push yourself over? You don’t wait for outside forces to make you take action; you take that action yourself. Take a step and feel yourself fall. It’s like flying, until you hit the bottom.
Then you do — hit the bottom, that is — and then you need to find the pieces of yourself back. Sometimes you need to wait for them to catch up; some of them fall slower than you do. Others fell faster, and have been accustomed to the bottom. They’ve been waiting for you to catch up. They’ve been waiting for you to wake up and smell the dirt beneath your toes.
What do you do, once you hit the bottom and you find yourself back and you feel ready to go on? Where do you go?
You can go up. Or you can go further down. Or to the side. You can go in any direction. And eventually, you’ll start to find your feet and you’ll become steadier on this ground you’ve discovered. It will feel like home. You will feel like you’ve found a real place, a place to stay happy and content and complacent.
Don’t.
There’s always another edge.
And you will find it sooner than you like, and once you reach the next edge, you don’t come back from it. You can’t backtrack; if you do, you stumble through mud until you reach another edge, and another, and another, and soon you realize they’re all around. You’re on an island surrounded by the edge. There’s only one edge, and you’re on it.
So you either fall, or you stay on the edge, and soon the sharpness, like obsidian, digs into your tendons, and you’re stuck there forever. You either step forward and take control, or you wait for someone else to show you where to go.
You move forward or you die.
Life is a series of edges and falls. For a long moment, you have perfect clarity. Then you step forward and you fly to your next step, the next destiny you face. Clarity is replaced by hard work, and after so long slogging through the mud you come to be happy with it.
But the rain always comes, and when it does, it’ll show you the next edge.
So what will you do when you reach it?
“But the rain always comes, and when it does, it’ll show you the next edge.
So what will you do when you reach it?”
Walk it like the tightrope that it is and hope that I don’t fall into the abyss.
I am familiar with edges. The ones I come to don’t drop off but seem at the foot of a new mountain or sometimes a hill. And when I reach one, I climb. Once I remember being atop a great wave and then there was a down and I dove crazily into it. Not sure why I don’t get the precipices. Perhaps it’s because I am a water person when it comes to going below. And I do love to dive. There are treasures in the deeps. But I was shattered very early, so in diving and climbing I’m always finding pieces of myself to put back in the puzzle. Whoa. Hidden benny there I never thought about before. Thanks for helping me see it.