My mid-life leap

I am writing this on my way to England. Not to visit but to stay. Getting a UK visa in this post-Brexit era was a long and winding path, but now the visa is granted.

I will be 58 years old in a few days. I have lived and worked in Norway all my life, most of the time only a couple of hours drive from where I was born. I have never considered myself to be adventurous. I have never been a mountaineer or a deep-sea diver. I’m a little scared of both heights and depths. My last car in Norway was an unremarkably sturdy and sensible Škoda; I have never felt the need to own a BMW.

Have I now acquired a taste for jumping off cliffs?

Yes. At least metaphorically spoken.

Why don’t we jump off cliffs more often? Because we are afraid to fall, naturally.

But what if we can fly if we try?

A few years ago, I would have scoffed at this question. Fly, me? It would be more probable to suddenly see a badger spread its wings and soar over the Norwegian mountains.

To float through life on old habits is a bland but comfortable thing. It might not be fulfilling. It might be outright painful. But at least it’s safe. If you never try, you never fail. The fear of failure was robust in me, as in most people.

My feet were glued to the ground all my life, and I never dared to test my air-borne abilities. It’s fail-safe to be a heavy-bellied badger, an expert slug-hunter of the early hours, seeking small things and expecting no more.

Like most people, the last thing I wanted was to appear as a fake eagle. To surge up in the sky, only to land sprawling like an old hen a minute later. Where I grew up, people would get a good laugh from such a spectacle.

So why leap off the ledge?

There are two reasons why a badger might forget the fear of falling. One is the prospect of finding something extraordinary, a reward so rich that any risk seems minute. The other is an immense fear, dreadful enough to overshadow any fright of failure and ridicule.

For me, it was both. I found the most wonderful person, the only human who is everything I always wanted from a friend and partner. My bigger fear? I knew that if I didn’t act on this, I would regret it every minute for the rest of my life.

So, I leapt.

I’m coming home.