opinion
It made sense.” “It was the right time.” “It felt like the natural next step.” People often use such simple language to describe decisions they once could not imagine being in a position to make. A home that was once beyond their means now makes sense to buy. The company they once imagined now has its first client and a clear reason to begin. Marriage and children have become choices within a relationship that already exists. Some of life’s biggest events are experienced not as monumental achievements, but as completely logical decisions.
Years earlier, those possibilities may have seemed to belong to another life. The company was only a name saved in someone’s phone and an idea of the work it might produce. Marriage and children could be imagined without any sense of who the other person would be or how that shared life might take shape. A future can exist in the imagination for years, clear enough to want but too distant to understand.
These are our impossible cliffs: futures we can see clearly without being able to connect them to the present. Across the water, a distant cliff appears against the horizon, but no route towards it is visible. It is not the height that makes it seem impossible. It is the unexplained distance between where we stand and where we hope to be. We know the destination; we cannot imagine the crossing.
Yet distance is only one position from which a future can be viewed. A life can look impossible from one point in time and completely logical from another.
The distant view feels
convincing because it is built from real information. Someone at 23 imagines owning a home and measures the possibility against the life they have now. Their income cannot support it. They do not know where they will settle. From that position, owning a home appears unfathomable. Yet, they are using one stage of life to judge a decision that may belong to another.
The conclusion may be accurate, but only for the period it describes. The calculation can determine whether buying makes sense at 23, not whether the same decision will make sense at 33. Present facts may be accurate without being prophetic.
Once that limit is forgotten, “I cannot see how this could happen from here” hardens into “This could never become my life.” The first is a statement about the present; the second is a judgment about the entire future. We often mistake what cannot yet be explained for what cannot happen.
The absence of a visible
explanation is not always
evidence of impossibility. Sometimes it simply means that we are standing too early in the story.
Standing too early does not mean that nothing can be seen; what can be seen belongs to that position. If the cliff represents the future visible at a distance, the lantern represents the clarity available along the way. It does not illuminate the crossing but reveals the ground that can be understood and acted upon now.
Someone may imagine creating a restaurant for years. They picture the lighting, the menu and every table occupied. Yet from the dining room, they encounter only the finished experience. They cannot see the judgments, knowledge and relationships from which such a place is built. The future is visible as an experience before it is available as instruction.
Imagining the restaurant more carefully cannot supply that knowledge. They have to enter hospitality. There, they learn how movement between the kitchen and dining room shapes service and how location shapes the kind of restaurant a space can sustain. The new position changes both the information available and the person interpreting it. The ‘how’ becomes intelligible along the way. Some paths become visible only once they are approached.
Understanding a route is not the same as having one. By acting on what they understand, they begin creating the conditions from which a restaurant could emerge.
Working in hospitality brings them into partnership with a chef. A series of dinners gives the idea a menu, an audience and evidence. A relationship formed through the same work brings a suitable space into view. The imagined restaurant begins acquiring a history.
The route was not simply hidden; parts of it did not yet exist. The future seemed impossible partly because the events that would explain it had not yet occurred.
We sometimes demand a map of a road that our own footsteps will help build. The ‘how’ is not always discovered before the journey. Sometimes it is produced by the journey. The impossible acquires logic when enough of the story around it has been lived.
By the time the decision to open the restaurant becomes real, “it made sense” accurately describes how the decision feels. The person is no longer trying to leap into a life imagined from a distance. They are responding to the life now surrounding them. Given everything that has happened, this is what makes sense next.
The restaurant did not become logical because the dream became smaller. It became logical because the missing middle was lived. Those years supplied the judgment, relationships and opportunity required. They also changed the person encountering it. The future did not need to make sense from the beginning. It needed to make sense by the time it arrived.
Today cannot provide reasons that belong to experiences not yet lived. The future does not need to make sense from here. The next step does. It must respond to what is available now and carry us to a position from which more can become possible.
Perhaps that is all the lantern was meant to provide: enough light to move beyond our present view. We need not know how the life that looks impossible from here will become logical from there. We need only recognise what makes sense from where we stand now. What looks impossible now may not feel impossible when it arrives. The journey may have explained it so completely that it simply becomes what makes sense next.
Neshmeeya Abbas is an author based in London. She can be reached at [email protected]
