Reflection

The man who said this had just swum the English Channel and was about four hundred kilometres from the end of a twenty eight year walk. We are raised to fear one thing, which is not getting there. Almost nobody is taught the other one: that arriving hurts too. A twenty eight year walk blows this up to a scale we can see, but it happens at ordinary scale constantly, on the day a degree finishes, the day a career stops, the day a child’s childhood ends. The thing that organised every one of your days will one day have nothing left to say. Knowing this is not meant to make you afraid of arriving. It is so that on the day you arrive you can recognise the emptiness for what it is, and know that it is not failure.