In response to our many LEAP photos, and the recent one of a woman wading in (a slow leap) – a definite obsession –  reader Maia Tabet emailed us this adage…with her tiny comment.

It’s perfect –  charmingly old-fashioned, almost children’s rhyme-ish –  and speaks to the practice we work to cultivate, of having faith in the process of doing something new and perhaps frightening, that a “net” or answer will appear. (The quote is by John Burroughs, a nineteenth century author and naturalist who also said: “A somebody was once a nobody who wanted to and did.”

The other swell piece of the exchange was learning about one of our readers, whom we’ve never met…

I’m a professional cook AND a literary translator, two tracks that people find hard to reconcile because there is generally such an expectation of linearity ... and when they try and reconcile my British accent with the fact that I am from from the very cosmopolitan city of Beirut and grew up rambling about the hills and shores of the eastern Mediterranean, then they’re really thrown for a loop. Those are some of the reasons why your blog speaks to me so!

Of course, we LOVE people who break stereotypes and ‘expectations of linearity’.

Thanks Maia!!

Related posts: how do you know when to take the leap?
jump! leap! (philippe halsman)
fly! (merce cunningham)
htom ashcraft’s sign: cures arise, remedies appear
‘fail better’ (samuel beckett)
barney rosset: a risktaker’s legacy
gandhi: ‘our beliefs become our…destiny.