Going Back, Going Down

to be a discoverer you hold close whatever

you find, and after a while you decide

what it is. Then, secure in where you have been,

you turn to the open sea and let go.

–William Stafford, from “Security”

Is the path to the waterfall an ascent or a descent?

Descents have a bad reputation that is mostly unjust. The metaphoric and melodramatic abuse of the whole idea obscures the fact that a descent can be an exhilarating, breathtaking thing, and far less arduous and fraught with competition and peril than the ascent.

On the way down, just so long as you’re not falling, you have a chance to catch your breath and take a good look around, to access whether all that climbing was worth it, and to see what you were climbing towards and from.

You have to turn your back to see what’s behind you, and it’s always a good idea to take the occasional long, hard look at what’s behind you. How else are you ever going to learn how far you’ve strayed, if in fact you’ve strayed.

I’m sure you’ve strayed. You must have.

But the human instinct is to keep going, and to associate this notion exclusively with forward motion. Implicit in this assumption are the ideas of both survival and progress, which strikes me as severely wrong-headed at the moment.

When you’re returning from some journey in the mountains aren’t you still moving? Isn’t retreat sometimes necessary for survival? And when you retrace your steps to retrieve something you’ve lost or left behind, aren’t you making the most important progress of all?

Easy world, you gave it once–

please quietly welcome it back,

that hand.

–William Stafford, from “Going On”