Reaching orbit

Artemis 2 showed up on my feed this week. Four astronauts looped around the far side of the Moon and are on their way back — NASA's first crewed lunar flyby in over fifty years, and the farthest any human has ever travelled from Earth.

Watching it, one thing kept circling in my head: getting to orbit is the hard part. Engineers have known this for decades. The fight is the climb out of the gravity well — the burn, the noise, the impossible weight of breaking free. After that, physics quietly takes over. Momentum and trajectory carry you the rest of the way.

I think life works the same way.

A good college is an orbit. Get into one and the system starts working in your favour — opportunities arrive without knocking, doors open before you reach for them, the people around you become a tailwind instead of a headwind. Hard work still matters, but the statistics are honest about it: the right school is a launchpad. And for most people, late teens is the only shot they get at boarding it.

But what about the people who missed that orbit? The ones who didn't get into the right school, or didn't even know there was a launch happening?

I want to believe it isn't over for them. I want to believe the work you do quietly, the books you read, the rabbit holes you fall into at midnight — these are also a kind of climb. Slower, lonelier, less celebrated. But still a climb. Another shot at the orbit, on a different timeline.

I see the same shape in running. Sign up a 5K and two hundred people show up — most of them woke up one morning and decided they should probably exercise. A 10K thins out the crowd. A half marathon? Only the people who have actually trained for it. People who have made running a part of who they are. They're already in the orbit of the sport.

But I don't want this to sound like the launchpad is full of people who aren't trying. That's not true. The launchpad is where the hardest work happens. The competition near orbit is brutal, the air is thin, and the people pushing the hardest are often the ones who can see how far there still is to go. Some of them are working harder than anyone already in orbit — they just haven't broken through yet. Looking up from down there, it's easy to convince yourself you never will.

Career feels the same. You train, you prepare, you put in the unglamorous reps, and at some point — if you're lucky and stubborn enough — you cross a threshold where the work starts pulling you forward instead of you pushing it. That's the orbit.

Once you're in it, I imagine things get clearer. You see your strengths and weaknesses with less noise. Decisions get simpler because you know what you're optimising for. You have a vision instead of a vague hope.

I say "imagine" because I'm not there yet. This is what I think it might look like from the outside, staring up at the people who already made it.

But I think getting there is the thing. Most of life is the climb.