The Cliffs We All Meet

I just finished the new Jim Collins book, “What to Make of a Life”, and it’s been quietly following me around the house for days.

I sit down to write, and I hear a sentence again. I take a walk and think, yes, that’s exactly what it felt like.

Collins spent ten years studying 34 remarkable lives — astronauts, musicians, suffragists, scientists, people whose stories you’d think you already knew — and built the whole book around three words: cliffs, fog, fire.

A cliff is the moment the ground you’ve been standing on is suddenly gone. The diagnosis. The phone call. The election you lost. The child who moved out. The job that ended. The career that peaked and then, imperceptibly at first, began to descend. Cliffs are not always tragic. Sometimes the cliff is a triumph so complete that you wake up the next morning and don’t know what the next morning is for. Ask any Olympian what happens the week after the closing ceremony. Ask any founder who finally sold the company.

The fog is what comes next.

And the fire — the fire is the thing Collins spent a decade trying to understand. Why do some people, after the cliff and through the fog, find their way to a second burning? And why do others, just as talented, just as loved, never quite get the flame going again?

I don’t have a neat answer. I’m not sure Collins does either, though he works hard at it and earns every page. What I have, instead, after finishing the book, is a feeling. And the feeling is this: the cliffs are not the interruption of your life. The cliffs are your life.

 

We are raised, most of us, to believe in a certain arc. You go to school, you work hard, you build a career, you raise a family, you retire, you rest. A single clean line, rising gently, like the approach to a summit you’ve been told is up there somewhere in the clouds. The brochure version.

But nobody lives the brochure.

What we live instead is a series of plateaus and drop-offs. You climb for a while. The view is good. You get comfortable. And then one Tuesday the floor gives way,and you find yourself in a country with no map, trying to remember how to breathe. Some of those drop-offs you choose. Most of them choose you. A few of them — and these are the ones we don’t talk about enough — were disguised as promotions, as weddings, as the thing you wanted most in the world and then got.

Getting what you wanted is a cliff too. Maybe the most disorienting one of all.

 

I keep thinking about the fog. Collins calls it a “befuddling fog,” and the adjective matters. It isn’t a clean sadness. It isn’t a grief you can name and honor and set on a shelf. It’s something stranger and more embarrassing — the inability to locate yourself. You know the feeling. You stand in the kitchen at three in the afternoon and realize you’ve been standing there for a while. You open your laptop and close it again. You read the same paragraph four times. You’re not depressed, exactly. You’re not grieving, exactly. You’re lost, and the worst part is there’s no one to ask for directions because the landmarks you used to navigate by aren’t there anymore.

I think we owe each other more honesty about the fog. We tell each other about the cliffs — the divorces, the deaths, the firings — because those have language. The fog doesn’t. The fog is the six months after, or the six years after, when you’re supposed to be fine, when the casseroles have stopped arriving, when everyone else has moved on to the next chapter of their own book, and you’re still standing in your kitchen at three in the afternoon wondering who you are now.

If you’re there — if you’ve ever been there — I want you to hear this: the fog is not a failure of character. The fog is the weather. It comes in off the ocean whether you like it or not, and it burns off when it burns off, and the only real mistake is believing you’re the only one who has ever been lost in it.

 

Here’s the part of Collins’s book that caught in my throat. He found, in studying those 34 lives, that the people who burned brightest late weren’t the ones who avoided the cliffs. Nobody avoided the cliffs. The cliffs are the price of admission. What those people did, again and again, was ask themselves a different question than the rest of us tend to ask.

Not what do I have to do now?

Not what would make me look successful again?

But: what do I want to be responsible for?

Read that one more time. It’s the whole book in a sentence. The people who found their second fire were the ones who treated the cliff not as the end of the story but as the moment the story got honest. Who looked at the rubble and asked, genuinely, given all of this, given who I am and what I now know, what do I want to carry forward?

Most of us, when we fall, spend the fog trying to climb back to the cliff we fell from. We want our old life back. We want to be the mayor again (for the record, I never did), the CEO again, the young parent again (guilty), the person we were before the diagnosis. That’s human. That’s the first instinct and it deserves compassion.

But the people who found their fire didn’t climb back. They walked. They took what they had learned on the high – ground and brought it down into the valley and started building something new out of it. Not a replacement. A continuation. The same fire, in a different hearth.

 

I’m past sixty now, and one of Collins’s most beautiful data points is this: across all the biographies of Benjamin Franklin, fifty-three percent of the pages are still ahead of him at age sixty. More than half. In an era when most people didn’t see sixty at all.

I think about that every morning now.

I think about the cliffs I’ve already been over, and the ones I can see coming, and the ones I can’t. I think about the friends I’ve lost and the ones I’m still lucky enough to annoy on bi-weekly Zoom calls. I think about the plays I haven’t written yet and the ones I have, and whether any of it matters. I think about what I want to be responsible for in the time I have left, and the answer is not the answer I would have given at thirty-five.

Maybe that’s the grace of the cliffs. They force the question younger selves are too busy to ask.

If you are standing at an edge right now — if you’ve just fallen, or you feel one coming, or you’re deep in the fog and can’t see your own hand in front of your face — please know two things.

The first is that you are not alone, and you are not broken. The cliffs are not a deviation from a life well lived. They are how life gets lived.

The second is that the fire is still possible. Not the same fire. A new one. Lit from the same flint, in a different wind.

Walk toward it when you’re ready. The fog will burn off. It always does.

And if it hasn’t yet — trust that it will. Find someone to sit with you until it does. But have faith that it will.