Look Before You Leap

The act of faith was beautifully captured by W. H. Auden: The sense of danger must not disappear: The way is certainly both short and steep, However gradual it looks from here; Look if you like, but you will have to leap. …. A solitude ten thousand fathoms deep Sustains the bed on which we lie, my dear: Although I love you, you will have to leap; O

“Leap, and the net will appear” is a saying we sometimes hear in reference to such situations.12 The idea behind the phrase is that when you are backed into a corner, an impossible solution will present itself. At the times when you feel stuck, the right thing to do is take a risk and go “all in” with whatever the scariest option might be.

A road diverges in the woods, and we have a choice. The safe one and the dangerous one. The one that pays well and the one that teaches a lot. The one that people understand and the one they don’t. The one that challenges us and the one that doesn’t.

It’s the cumulative result of these choices that leads to a life worth writing about, or a life wort

We can’t write off the danger of complacency, growing rigidity, imprisonment by our own comfortable habits and opinions. Look around you. How many people whom you know well — people even younger than yourselves –are already trapped in fixed attitudes and habits. A famous French writer said “There are people whose clocks stop at a certain point in t