Just out of sight

Out for a walk the other morning on a path I know well, I found myself stopping as an image came to mind.

At the halfway point, I turned around and looked back up the hill I’d just come down. The path curved gently away around a bend, disappearing from view. I took my phone out and captured it, though I’m not sure the photo quite held what I’d seen.

There was something in that moment.

We spend so much of our time looking ahead, trying to see the path in front of us. It’s rarely straight. There are bends, rises, dips, bits you can’t quite make out. And yet, somehow, we’re always standing here, wherever “here” happens to be, having already travelled a version of that same kind of path.

All those turns. All those stretches where we couldn’t quite see what was coming. And still, we arrived.

I stood there for a bit longer than usual, looking up the hill. Wondering, I suppose, where that path actually leads. Not the literal one – I know where that goes – but the bit just out of sight. Around the bend. Over the rise.

The truth is, I didn’t really know what was up there. I just knew that if I kept walking, I’d find out when I got there.

I might be wrong, but it feels like life has a similar rhythm to it. We keep moving even with the uncertainty. Even with the moments where we pause or hesitate. And yet, if I look back properly, there’s a long list of things I’ve already found a way through.

It’s easy to forget that. Easy to get caught standing still, looking ahead and wondering if we’ve got what it takes for whatever’s coming next.

I’ve been dipping into a book recently by a friend, Stan Horwitz. He writes about the pace of change in the world, particularly with AI, and doesn’t really soften it. There’s a lot in there that could feel unsettling if you sit with it for too long. But there’s also something else running through it… a sense that there is still a place for us in all of this.

Not by standing back, but by stepping into it. Figuring it out as we go.

That idea seemed to echo what I’d felt on the path this morning.

We don’t get to see the whole route laid out in advance. We never really have. And yet we keep going. Step by step. Sometimes confidently, sometimes not so much.

Maybe it’s less about knowing what’s around the bend, and more about remembering that we’ve walked enough paths already to trust ourselves with whatever we find when we get there.

I stood for a moment longer, then turned and carried on up the hill.