The Reach of Yesterday

I keep a pair of my father’s old leather shoes in the back of my closet, the soles worn thin at the heels from years of pacing. They are stiff now, holding the shape of his stride long after he stopped walking in them. There is something deeply fragile about the way we prepare for a future that hasn’t arrived yet, stretching ourselves toward a horizon we cannot quite touch. We spend our youth in a state of constant suspension, feet hovering above the ground, reaching for a version of ourselves that exists just beyond our fingertips. It is a beautiful, aching kind of hunger—the belief that if we only extend far enough, we might finally grasp the thing we are chasing. We are all suspended in that mid-air moment, caught between the earth we are leaving behind and the height we hope to claim. What happens to the weight of our ambition when we finally come back down to the ground?

Aman Raj Sharma has captured this feeling of suspension in his image titled Edge of Success. It reminds me that the most important part of the journey is the leap itself. Does this image make you think of a goal you are still reaching for?