The Event Horizon

0400 is a groggy time to be waking up and headed to the airport. Excitement - or was it anxiety? - mixed with a handful of fatigue, and a pinch of serenity as I found myself driven to the airport.

In the car, a large grey box was taking up almost the entire truck and back seat, and a grey black duffel bag. The box carried my bike, broken into pieces and packed in foam between two hard plastic shells. In the bag, clothes, a helmet, sleeping bag and bad, and a pot. Together, these two bags will make up the entire contents of my life for the next 11 weeks.

The 4 am lights slipped through the inky blackness like fish as we hurtled to the airport. A waxing gibbous moon provided a soft illumination for the world.

That hurtling feeling was not new to me. It feels like jumping off a high cliff into water. Your friend knows a spot. He takes you and a few others to it. He tells you he has heard about the jump - it’s supposed to be awesome, lift changing, really. You decide in the car that you will do it. You start telling your friends “When we get there, I’m just going to do it.” “Yeah, whatever,” your friends reply. You arrive and see the cliff. It’s awesome. Tall and imposing. High, but not too high. This is what I need, you tell yourself. A jump like that. You hike up. On the way, you ask the friend who has done it how sketchy the landing is. “Deep and clear,” your friend replies.

You get to the top. You peer over the edge. It is actually a lot higher. From here, you reflect. So do your friends. “Whooo wee. That is high,” they say. The fear starts to set in. Or is that excitement? You could turn back, but you want to be known as the guy who follows through more than you don’t want to jump.

It is here that you become fully committed to jumping. It is here that you let yourself be propelled by the momentum your prior actions have imbued into your present self’s reality.

But it’s not like you have time for fear, or thinking, or anything else anyway! You have things to do - a jump to mentally and physically prepare for. You strip to your swimwear. You kick yourself for not caching the towel where you’ll get out of the water, not where you are getting into it. You imagine what the dive should look like, how you will leave the edge and enter the water.

With your friends watching, you walk to the edge one last time, turn around, and walk 5 paces back. Then you start to run for the lip. It is at this point that the inexorable force takes full control - you have passed the event horizon.

You watch from a first-person perspective. You see your bare feet in the stone of the cliff edge, and you feel your body lower and tense for the run.

Step.

Try as you might, you cannot stop.

Step.

And in a momentary flash of realization.

Step.

You finally realize that you have been here for a while.

Step.

Your mind goes blank.

Step.

Your toes curl around the edge. And you jump.

So New Zealand? But why? How exactly did this trip happen?

The high-level summary is that I have been pretty busy for a long time.

Two summers ago, I got a job as a student researcher at a lab at Stanford, working with robotics. The following school year was long and hard (as one might expect from a place like Stanford). In the spring, I got a summer internship at the USGS (top of the heap in academic geology). That spring, I realized I needed a break, and I wouldn’t get one by default if present trends continued.

So, not long after accepting my USGS job, between finishing my design capstone and my math class on infinite series, I thought through which quarter-long period made sense to take off. Not the present spring, I was enrolled and had classes to finish. Not the summer, the summer job would prevent that. Nor could I take off the following fall - I had already agreed to TA a class that would pay my tuition (and me) for a quarter. How about next winter, I said to myself. The scheduler in my head looked up from the ledger of my life, page freshly opened to winter 2026, which it had been scrutinizing. “That one, thus far, looks very clear of huge obligations … surprisingly,” it said " Ok," I said back, “that is the one I shall take off then. Go ahead and block it off, and we can see if there are any issues.”

By the time I got to where I was going, I had decided to take the quarter off and do anything other than school or work.

But I didn’t really tell anyone - not at first. I sat with it, and let the potential of the future build. I kept the space free from obligations. When someone mentioned something in the spring, I would nod. When they asked me to be there and do something, I would excitedly tell them I would be gone in the spring. I, in fact, was taking the quarter off, as if it were already true. “Yeah, this upcoming winter, I’m going to take the quarter off,” I told my master’s advisor, my boss at the podcast I work for¹, and my bosses at the climbing gym. I made it clear that they could not expect me to be there in the winter. Partially, this was to ensure that I had not missed anything in my thinking, and partly to set myself up to be embarrassed if I did not actually go through with it.

Mind you, no ticket was booked, no lodging was acquired², nothing was actually going to happen. But the way was being kept clear.

By the end of spring, I had decided to bikepack. I race bikes, and have for a while, so the idea of bikepacking was already lodged deeply in my head as something I would LOVE to do. It would not be my first rodeo - the backcountry lifestyle and I are good friends. In many ways, I have built my life around the ability to do them comfortably. Bikepacking seemed so alluringly new and at the intersection of all my interests that I had to give it a shot.

The location came slightly later. Winter, it turns out, is cold, and while my bike can tolerate the cold (barely), I cannot. Which meant I had all the deserts of the Northern Hemisphere (and trails like the Arizona Trail), or pretty much anywhere in the Southern Hemisphere (not that there is a whole lot of land there). Patagonia and Australia were top of the list until I mentioned the trip to a Kiwi professor in a class of mine. He looked at me with pity. “Australia,” he said, slightly incredulous. “Yeah, I think it would be fun,” I responded. “Nah mate. Why would you go there?” He asked incredulously. “In Australia,” he said, “there are these big flies. They land on you, and you go to brush them away, and they just sit there.” He paused. “It’s kinda like the Australians.”³ “Nah mate. You should go to New Zealand instead.” “What about Patagonia?” I responded. “Nope. Remote. Uncertain weather. Do you even speak the language? Mate, just go to New Zealand. Someone like you would love it there.”

So New Zealand it would be. It was that simple.

The spring ended. I walked at my graduation. The summer began, and promptly, what was supposed to be a chill schedule with “just a 9-5” became hectic and busy. I ran a series of tango practicas on the main quad, got up to some multipitch climbing on the weekends (leading my first sport multi, trad single, and trad multi), continued editing and airing episodes of my radio show⁴, and otherwise filled my schedule close to bursting.

Why? It’s kind of just who I am. At every turn, it appears, I find myself taking on more and more. The class I said I would drop - I kept because it is just that interesting. The club I was hesitant about joining - now I’m on the leadership team. The job I promised to keep to only 6 hours a week - staying up through the long nights finishing the work which, at the end of the day, just had to get done. Every quarter I have had at Stanford has been a sprint-level effort at a mile distance. They feel like dreaded 800m dashes. One after the other, 13 times.

And this is the real reason I am taking the quarter off to bikepack in New Zealand. I want the chance to work through why I get myself so busy, without the overhead of trying to be a different person while running my life as it is currently structured.

What I want is a chance to prototype my schedule, moving fast and failing forward, to see if I can build tools that allow me to crawl out of the chronic overload in which I consistently find myself. I have written up a slate filled with things for me to do.

What I want is a clean slate. I want a scratch sheet of paper to try out some ideas on. I want to have the option to do nothing for a day - literally sit there - or to ride 150 miles just because I decided I would - and have no repercussions beyond boredom and hunger⁵. I want to see how I can make doing what I want/need for myself work with the kind of person who is able to serve others⁶. It’s a fine line to walk, but one that I intend to figure out in my life, and one I can start making progress on now.

In the Stanford framework (my existing life), this kind of experimentation would have to be carried out delicately. And likely, while trying to strike a balance, I will over-cull, or not cull enough, leaving me not fully satisfied. I want the chance to push to the extremes and see what happens - see who I become and deeply know what is comfortable and what I have grown comfortable with.

I bought my ticket in the summer. My parents came to stay with me, see what my situation looked like, and get a tour of the USGS. They probably came to see me too.

On that fateful day in July, we bought the tickets. My dad wrote the itinerary out on a Post-it note. I took a photo.

And that was all the pomp and circumstance. A few clicks, and in the future, I would find myself on the plane to CHC. Wherever that was. In lived reality, nothing was different. There was no indication, except a kind of IOU represented by a hypothetical ticket that was sent via email.

But it was this moment that I crossed the point where the default became going. I passed over the event horizon of this crazy journey.

I think we went to lunch together. Not to celebrate, but because we needed to eat.⁷

I write this now, catapulted by a plane over the Pacific Ocean, flying to Christchurch, after which I will start assembling my bike and begin my “Big Walkabout.”

How I got here feels shocking, as I reflect. But the work I have done has put me in a position where I am actually on a plane, actually doing the thing I said I would.

It feels like I have been talking for a while. I have been talking to people about the jump off the edge, I have been making preparations for what it feels like to freefall - intellectualizing that feeling after you have committed to the jump. I have been working so hard to ensure all my equipment works, and that I have just enough. Somewhere in there, I passed the event horizon - the point of no return, where the jump becomes inevitable without even realizing it.

I have lined up and committed to the run. I have been watching myself take the first step as I purchased the ticket in the summer. I felt the second step land when I went bikepacking with my roommate up in Marin. I felt the next step as I purchased a bike rack and a tent. I felt the fourth as I found someone to look after my place, finished finals, and a few other hanging projects for my work. I felt the next step when I finished making the last bit of equipment I needed and published this website.

And now I am feeling my toes curl around the lip of rock, poised as the last point between the solid world of the known and the breathless falling uncertainty of the unknown.

And I jumped.

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