I keep a habit of writing down whatever I'm thinking, without editing it into something wiser than it was. Most of it never gets read again. Occasionally, something I wrote years ago resurfaces and reads like a letter from someone I used to be — someone whose fear I recognise and whose conclusion I no longer share.
These are two such notes. The same image, a jump between cliffs, eight years apart. In the first, I am mid-air and certain that attention is the thing I cannot spare — glance at what you're carrying and you fall — so the accounting of what was lost and what stayed waits until I land. In the second, that accounting has come in, and the instruction reverses: hold on to what you're carrying through the jump, precisely because you don't yet know which side of it you're landing on.
I've left them as they were written, side by side, and let the distance between them speak.
2017
"I'm in between jumps; I want to reach a cliff. It is far and hard to reach. In the moment when I'm in the air, I can't afford to think about my belongings, as the slightest distraction would lead to a fall, and I'm unaware of the place it would take me to. Only once I reach the cliff shall I look upon what I lost and what stays with me."
18th August, 2025
"There is always a higher cliff after you reach one. You will always have to take jumps to reach another. But while you're in the jump — the time of uncertainty, the journey — you've got to hold on to your belongings firmly. The fall you have been fearing is just as unexplored as the cliff you're trying to reach. Your belongings are the only constants in both the cliff and the fall."