This essay is a guest post by my partner, Dave, inspired by our young neighbor Aura. The concept is Dave’s with some AI word-polishing.
I watched her from the front porch — a five-year old girl still wearing her favorite blue and pink scooter helmet, arms stretched toward the sky like tiny wings trying to find flight. The cedar branch hung just beyond her fingertips, swaying in the breeze in a way that had caught her attention. She leaped again and again, each jump a declaration of hope.
“It’s too far to reach,” she announced to nobody in particular, her voice carrying no defeat, only observation. Yet she jumped once more. And again. Her sneakers barely left the ground, but her spirit soared with each attempt. It was too far to reach, but she reached anyway.
There was something of Amelia Earhart in that little girl’s defiance — the same refusal to accept limitations. When Earhart first glimpsed an airplane at a state fair, aviation was a man’s domain, the sky a ceiling too high for women to touch. “It’s too far to reach,” the world told her in a thousand silent ways. But she reached anyway.
She reached through flying lessons with instructors who doubted her resolve. She reached through record attempts that others called reckless dreams. She reached across oceans and continents, her plane a silver needle threading through clouds. Even when the final flight took her into mystery, she was still reaching — toward that distant shore that beckoned from beyond the horizon.
The little girl finally gave up on the cedar branch, but not before one last leap, one final stretch toward the impossible. In that moment, she had already succeeded. Not in touching the branch, but in refusing to let distance define her limits.
This is the calculus of the human spirit: we grow not by what we grasp, but by what we reach for.
Every outstretched hand, every leap toward the unreachable, adds inches to our souls. We become larger than our limitations, taller than our circumstances.
When your dreams hang just beyond your fingertips, remember the girl who jumped anyway. Remember Amelia, engines humming toward the edge of the world. Remember that the reaching itself is the victory — that the space between your hand and your goal is not emptiness, but possibility.
It may be too far to reach. Reach anyway. This is what makes us human. This is what makes us whole.
