Out and about in the fog at the edge of the world by Uzay G. '26

I like standing at the edge, stopping there and looking down at the valley till my breath comes back. Feeling the world come to life. Seeing the raw scale of man fill my view only when I choose to see it. Seeing the world always, overwhelming with its color. Do you feel in your bones that insane color jumping off the cyan water trickling down the peak or the sun beating down your temples as you run up against it?

 I’ve been standing at the edge a lot recently. Or maybe it always seems that way but just in different hues. I’ve been traveling for the last month around the world – it’s been ethereal and intense and beautiful. And now I just started an exchange back in Paris.

It’s a moment of cultural reckoning, 3 months to settle back and see what it’s like being here and meeting other young people doing similar stuff as an actual student. When I chose to go to MIT 3 years ago, I made a choice. And then I kept making choices over and over. And sometimes I would look at myself in the mirror and wonder: is this who I am?

Sometimes an old woman says that life is like a leaf in a stormy void. It floats against the shape of the world, makes some jumps and not some others, finds itself somewhere else, and keeps going, and someday you wake up and look around and hopefully know where you are. Maybe soaked and shriveled or plunged in dirt or laying your life down in the sunlight of a suburb. I chose to do this exchange, because I wanted to jump back up in the sky and say, no! I can’t let go let me see all the leaves rolling in the wind, I don’t know where I will land yet!!!

Last month I chose to teach some people math & ML & talk about dreams in the face of a moonlight mountain while drinking tea. And I chose to go to a city nearby and taste that heavenly sweet potato with the sesame paste on top. For a few hours I felt the city move and I followed its slanted curve and talked to some of its people and they told me about their worries and we shared something at the top of an abnormally large tower looking down on the world, an edge jutting out into the sky, nestled between forest and concrete.  I felt raw beauty in this place I would probably never come back to again, if there is one to come back to.

Then I went to a nearby land that I like and I walked around a lot. I walked and thought and looked and stood at the edge and listened. I chose to walk alone and listen to the sound of silence, and I chose to splice work in my moments of exploration, like the fictional man who brings a tupperware of salad to pepper into his burger everytime he goes to MacDonalds. I ate good food again, and went to a hot spring where I felt the ecstasy of hot water and then cold, over and over, next to the mountains. At another urban hot spring I met people from many different lands, and we spoke of those boundaries and then of the cracks that we felt comfortable enough to let slip through them. But then again I left and chose to be alone and turn right when it felt right, jump into life and run throughout the city, or go climbing, or try every different dessert in the convenience store.

Finally I went to another land, another edge of this universe, and stared the machine that burst through the city day after day in the eyes. I felt its metallic taste in my mouth and I mostly liked it. This time I chose to be with friends, of which many choose to live in the machine. But I mostly went around with those who I was there to work with, mostly just having the time to eke out a few spare sparks of metal from the rest (but in due time). So again I walked across the city on my worn feet, and we got to open a box full of more lives, but this time they went backwards rather than forward. They unraveled like thread under our hands as we went through them like TV episodes, replaying their trajectory and imagining what it would be like to fly the same course.

We learned a lot. We imagined ourselves in machines of all kinds and colors. But we also felt this nudging tingle that maybe the world could let us fly without metal, our bare skin slowly slipping against the shape of the world and holding on just because. We went up some trees, and looked down on this valley again. What a place. We chose to work till the lack of sleep made us stupid, and then we said that if we succeeded we would go up a mountain. We failed, but it was close. So it goes.

We felt the insane energy of a world writhing into neat shape, a 1000 doors suddenly opening and not enough time to look through all of them. The raw excitement at seeing that really you are the one driving. So what will you do? When the storm calms and suddenly the void is yours to cut through like a block of stone waiting to be made what will you slice? and then what will stare back at you when the dust settles down?

Being in control is a funny thing. There is a mountain to climb and a cliff to fall off of and at the end of the day you need to stick the landing. I think being in control is something I value a lot. I hold on to the wind like I can’t let go and hold and hold and push it left and right until it finally pushes me where I belong. Like a child holding on to his toys for too long. But even so I would not say I am a very controlled person. Sometimes I see a peak from afar and as I go up along the crests I choose to fall to the side through translucent glass which I go against and I break it with my hands and then I fall onto one leg awkwardly, trying to catch myself, and I think wow yeah I was in control and I knew what I was doing and now I can see the rainbow glowing through the mountain but my hands are bleeding.

Why try to take stock of the course you might take when you can simply sway back and let the world astonish you with its color? An old woman told me that sometimes you can hold onto an egg so hard your hands go white and it shell cracks all over your skin. But sometimes, when you finally let go and look down onto it, there is an eye staring back at you and you feel the miracle of the egg and the world it hides.

But most of the time you just lost it all because you couldn’t bring yourself to eat the egg in your hands while you could have. Because you couldn’t just close your eyes and open your mouth and let the warmth gladly flow through. It can be hard to know when to stop and sit on some rock of the mountain and pull out your sandwich and stare onto the green.

Maybe I want to hold on because I lack control where it matters. Have you ever heard the myth of Arjuna and the bird from the Mahabharata?  Maybe I would like that level of control:

Dronacharya gave a test to his students. He showed them the bird and said, what do you see? One by one they said the bird, the leaves, the trees, the people around, etc… And then he asked Arjuna: what do you see? And Arjuna looked onto the bird and the storm calmed and the leaf stopped its course and his breath shortened and for a moment he stood at the edge and the world shrunk until there was no longer such a thing as an edge and he saw what the bird was and he said: I see its eyes, only its eyes, like a vivid point calling out to me in a sea of nothing. And then his limbs moved of their own accord and he drew his arrow and shot it straight into its eyes.

For Arjuna the question of control and trajectory and choice and energy dissolve into the simple reality that there is just one world like a blue dot there in front of you and all your life wind has been pushing you straight forward and your legs are walking forwards and your eyes are staring down the path and all you see is the eyes of the bird waiting for you to look into them and there is no notion of control or you and your shape hitting against the world there is simply the motion of life slipping from one moment to the next in fundamentally the only way that could ever make sense.

Arjuna stands on the edge and knows he will not fall, because there is simply no world in which he ever could. He is here to stand there. This is what he is made for. He is here to breathe the mountain air and he is here to look down at the valley once again and see the bird waiting for him miles away, and then to reach for it. Maybe there is something here that is beyond control.

Maybe this is peace.