Why Did the Chicken Cross the Road: The Importance of Being Plucky

There's a Scottish man I met at Everest base camp who tried to summit four times and never got past Advanced Base Camp. I offered my sympathies, the way a young man does when he assumes the top of a thing is the whole point of it. He looked at me with the particular patience of someone who has learned not to explain himself to people like me, and said: *Ach no, the climb is the whole thing.*

I've been thinking about that for twenty years.

We spend most of our lives in pursuit of an arrival. The person, the apartment, the title, the body, the peace of mind. We are exquisitely motivated by the gap between where we are and where we think we're supposed to be. And then, for a lucky or unlucky few, the gap closes. We get there. We stand in the life we spent years engineering and we wait for the feeling that was supposed to come with it.

It's very quiet up there.

The dangerous thing about getting what you want is that the wanting stops. And it turns out the wanting was doing most of the work — keeping you sharp, keeping you moving, giving Tuesday a reason. The thing you thought would free you from the hunger just hands you a different kind of empty.

This is not a counsel of despair. It's the opposite.

The pursuit *is* the purpose. Not as a consolation prize — as the actual design. The soul doesn't come here to collect. It comes to work something out. Sometimes a whole life is spent on one desire, one entanglement, one unresolved thing carried forward like a stone in a coat pocket. And when it's resolved — really resolved, not suppressed — something in you quietly says *next.* Not with grief. With a clean readiness.

The most dangerous thing in love, in work, in any life worth having, is mundanity. Not conflict. Not loss. Mundanity. Repetition dressed as stability. The maintenance of an ideal long after the ideal stopped being true. That is where people go missing inside their own lives — not in the dramatic collapses, but in the long slow mornings that all feel the same.

And here is where it gets uncomfortable.

Because the grassy verge is very comfortable. You worked hard to get there. You built the life, you furnished it, you defended it. And comfort, held too long, curdles. We see it in the lives of people who stopped risking themselves and started risking others instead — who mistook wealth or power or status for the arrival they were always looking for, and finding it still hollow, began extracting from the world around them what they could no longer generate from within. Exploitation dressed up as ambition. Harm dressed up as entertainment. Superiority as a substitute for growth. The drive doesn't go away when you stop pointing it at yourself. It just finds other targets.

The reset is always available. But it requires stepping off the verge.

Onto the sunbaked asphalt. Into the exposure. You leave the safety of the thing you worked so hard to build, you commit to the crossing, and for a brief terrible moment you are completely in the open — no cover, no guarantee, visible to everything. Possibly roadkill. Probably fine.

After a few crossings you notice something: the fun part *is* the risk. The dash itself. The brief devotion to deliverance from the humdrum. Not the other side, which will become a verge soon enough. The road. The crossing. The pluck required to leave.

Aye, that's the whole thing.