Cliffs of Moher: 600 Feet Above the Atlantic at Sunset

I came to Ireland to look for family who have been gone hundreds of years and friends who are beginning a new chapter together. But over the Atlantic I found myself thinking about people I have never met. It never really rained, but it was not dry either. I drove out to the coast in the late afternoon on the left side of the road, sitting on the right side of the car, negotiating the roundabouts and counting on the patience of everyone around me. I arrived at the Cliffs of Moher a little after six in the evening, with the last of the day’s visitors walking back the other way. The forecast had promised the clouds would break before dark, and thankfully they did. Hundreds of feet of cliffside below me, a couple of hours of light remaining, and the question I had carried this far, finally out in the open.

Cliffs of Moher

O'Brien's Tower on the headland at dusk, with a sea stack below the cliff face

A few days ago, I crossed the Atlantic with a tablet full of Irish programming, but spent most of the flight thinking about something else. Not the trip. Not the coast. Just a handful of people I have never met and would likely not recognize if they sat down next to me. People whose weeks I somehow keep up with. Over nine hours offline turned out to be the first time I had thought about what that had become for me. I landed in Dublin carrying gratitude I had not gone looking for, which is usually the kind worth keeping, and it was still riding along on a coastal road while I drove with far more caution than confidence.

There was another question out there too, and it also followed me across the ocean the way those things do when you are still for long enough. What do you do? Four simple words, asked of me a hundred times a year, and I am not sure I have ever answered it well. I had been reading something this past week that turned the question around on me, and I did not expect it to matter until I was standing at the edge with nowhere else to look. What I found had less to do with the view and more to do with the order I had spent a good portion of my life trying to live in.

The Journey…

The cliffs had something else to say once the last of the crowd had gone. I scanned in just after six in the evening, sixty degrees, with people already walking the other way toward the parking lot, done for the day. Rain had not fallen but the day was wet, leaving the Liscannor stone dark and slick underfoot. The wall beside the path was patched with lichen. I turned north past O’Brien’s Tower. The wind came from the east, off the land and out to sea, which I had not expected. It pushed at my back instead of into my face. The air smelled of wet grass and cattle rather than salt. Six hundred feet below, the Atlantic kept crashing at the base of the rock, and I watched the waves strike before the sound reached me. I found myself counting like one does with lightning and thunder… one, one-thousand… two, one-tho…

That delay caught my attention. The sea kept arriving a moment late, and before long I was waiting for it. South of the tower, the cliffs faded into layers, each wall of rock a little paler than the one before it, separated by mist instead of rain. Fulmars, stiff-winged birds that live here year round, held their route along the face without flapping, riding the air that pushed up the cliff, and the gulls on the ledges below never stopped calling. I crouched down to fix the lace on my boot and placed my hand on the paving stones, realizing that the ridges under my palm were trails pressed into mud over three hundred million years ago. I had come for the walk but found I was mostly standing still. A year ago I would have counted this day in miles and called it a short one. However, it did not feel short this evening.

By sunset most voices were gone and my own boots on the wet stone were the loudest thing out there. The clouds began to open to the west, just as the forecast had promised, and warmth finally touched the grey faces of the cliffs. Below O’Brien’s, a tower of rock called Branaunmore stood alone, cut away from the cliff by the sea long ago, with white water turning at its base. The sun slipped into the open Atlantic while the shadow line climbed the rock. I stayed for a half hour afterward, and that was the part I remembered most. The cliffs were quieter then, though perhaps I had simply become quiet enough to really notice them. I did not earn the height on this trek, as I drove there, scanned a ticket, and walked along the old paved path to the edge of the country. Still, standing there as the place emptied out seemed to ask something of me. Not effort. Not explanation. Maybe only the willingness to remain after everyone else had gone home, and I was glad I did.

Gratitude…

Surprisingly, the people I thought about during my nine-hour flight to Dublin were people I had never met. I had come prepared for the flight, loading my tablet with Irish romantic comedies, documentaries, travel shows, and enough food programs to make me reconsider airline snacks. Seattle disappeared behind me into the evening, and I crossed the country in darkness, eventually slipping out over the Atlantic. With the screen only inches away, my attention kept returning to a handful of people whose work had become part of my weeks, people who share their lives online through writing and photography. I knew their ideas, their struggles, the places they traveled, the food they loved, and the way the world looked through their lens. Somewhere along the way, I had begun noticing when one of them went quiet, much as I would notice a friend who had been out of touch, and I could not say when that started.

With the wifi turned off, I noticed something else. I have no claim on any of them. I cannot call any of them. Not one of them owes me a word, and they keep offering one anyway. Outside of any brief exchange through comments, none of it was ever written for me, which may be why it reached me at all. I sat with that thought, somewhere over open water with the movies still running. The hours gave me the time to understand how much I had come to count on it. By the time I crossed into morning, that thought had settled into gratitude. I was grateful for people willing to put a piece of themselves into the world without knowing who might need it.

I drove the Irish coast on the left side of the road, sitting on the right side of the car, which required enough attention to keep my thoughts from wandering. Most hiking mornings have carried me into the sunrise. This one carried me west, with the setting sun and the cliffs waiting ahead of me. Most of the thinking was already done. Some people are carrying difficult things while they write, and I understand that better than I once did. Most weeks, I have my own version of it with a lens and a journal, sharing enough to be honest while still keeping some things close. Maybe that was why their words had found me. Connection does not always start with an introduction or a handshake. Sometimes it begins with someone sharing a story and trusting that it might matter to someone they will never meet. I wanted to keep showing up for that reason too.

Reflections…

The answer had been waiting inside a question for years. What do you do? It is often the first thing anyone asks, and the easiest question to answer without telling anyone anything real. I had carried that trail-thought across an ocean, and it joined me from my first step, six hundred feet above the Atlantic with nothing west of me but water. For most of my life, I answered with a job title and let it stand in for the rest of me. I am not sure when I stopped believing the two were the same thing. Somewhere in the last couple of years the structure came apart, and I have been trying to say why ever since.

I had spent years trying to understand whether I was supposed to know who I was first and then find a career that matched. That seemed like the sensible order. It also left little room for someone like me, an introvert who had never been comfortable standing in the spotlight. I treated those parts of myself as limitations and learned to keep them separate from the role I played at work. Marketing rewarded the opposite, or I believed it did. So I got good at it and kept the rest of myself for evenings and the weekend, which seemed like a fair trade at the time. I kept the two apart for years, and it did not occur to me to ask what that was costing me.

That order changed when Kelly began needing care around the clock, and there was no real question about where my attention belonged. The priority was her. What I did have to decide was work, and I could not be for my team what they deserved. I cared about them too much to pretend otherwise, so I let it go. At the same time, I was fortunate that my workplace had a gap nobody had filled. Someone needed to carry the story of our culture clearly and authentically. I stepped into it because it fit the shape my life had taken, and that was all the reasoning I needed. It felt right. I could not have said why, but I acted anyway.

Along the cliff, I recalled the missing piece from a reading earlier in the week. Herminia Ibarra spent years studying people who reshaped their working lives, and she found the advice most of us follow is backwards. We do not think our way to a new self and then go act on it. We act, we try things, and the answer arrives after. Reading her, I recognized the truth of that in my own life, but I also saw a difference. The work had not created a new version of me. It had given the version already there somewhere to go. I climbed to a fire lookout in July that had lost the job it was built for but was still standing, still tended. This was a similar thought from a different viewpoint. Empathy, humility, introversion, kindness, the four things I had spent a career apologizing for, were exactly what the work required. In my new role, the line between work and the rest of my life began to fade.

There was also a part of the role no job description could capture. Sometimes people who were getting in their own way let me walk beside them for a while. Most of the time, they found their own path forward. Then I watched them step into the spotlight, proud of what they had done, and that was enough for me. I never needed my name attached to that part. Maybe that was the answer I had been carrying all along. What I did mattered less than finding work that gave the rest of me permission to show up. The job title was never going to explain me, and it was never supposed to. I am good with that. The path continues.

-Ken