Exert, the Pursuit

Left foot forward. The tonal architecture of the movement defines the path taken: a muffled clank, a solid clink. The temporal gap creates parsing potential—a way, a new arrangement to be found amidst the hitching past clinging, to avoid time taken to the extreme of lingering they must go to great lengths before any novelty turns their head. Atop the ground, above the sound, they see across the land of unfulfillment to reach into and beyond the apparent possible, the adjacent fallible.

“Before taking on anything, I gauge it: Is it good enough? The kernel must be impeccably defined: Is it good enough? The surrounding considerations merely deserve a cursory look: Is it good enough? Really, it is a matter of knowing which components fit into where, of being decisive about what to leave out.”

“Am I good enough? The heavy lifting will be exercised once confidence builds up. Skills matter, it is known. Yet, are the most successful the most skillful? Perspiration beats preparation.”

Walking through a dense fog, only a circumference reveals itself. No map, no compass, no idea. Once the fog clears, they think, everything will be clearer, the bottom will line up. For now, every step is a leap of faith, a grueling adventure taken on with aplomb and gut. It feels blinding: the fog of walk. It reveals nothing: the god of qualms. Legend says there are towers sitting just beneath the clouds from which one can overlook the world. Legend says these have been built with sweat and blood, with tears and strife. Legend says people never climb down once they’re up there. The ideal sun in lieu of the ragged earth. So they say.

“If I could only know what to do next…”

Neat New Eden. The seed of the discord was planted well before any one set foot in a coarse bargain with the hardened reality bestowing us. The seeming coherence of things only grants us the ability to imperceptibly shape them to our liking. The sieve through which reality is experienced gives off a feeling of control when the locus of steerability is of no spatiotemporal extent. The ceiling is never reached by any one.

A thin brightness begins to insist itself at the edge of perception—not illumination, but permission. The fog does not lift so much as it loosens its grip, and in that slackening they sense the outline of choice: not the grand, cinematic fork in the road, but the smaller, almost insulting decision to take one more step without certainty as a reward. The body keeps its own ledger, tallying clank and clink into something like cadence, until the pursuit stops feeling like an argument to be won and starts to resemble a craft: the patient fitting of effort to moment, the refusal to demand applause from the horizon. Somewhere, a tower might exist; somewhere, it might not. Either way, the ground is here, and the foot—left, then right—learns to trust the ordinary miracle of contact.