The end of summer each year presents us with an interesting mental and spiritual construct, a feeling we are living in a kind of “frontier” between the past and the future.  Frontiers, the edges of the worlds we know, fascinate me because they hint at expansion into a region between the known and the unknown.

While we think of frontiers as physical regions, they are as much about what goes on in our heads and hearts. The geography of this kind of frontier is defined by our ability to ingest and digest the new, the unexplored, our "Fin del Mundo.” The edge of our world.

We all should find our own Fin del Mundo a few times in our lives, and it can be a fascinating and terrifying experience while also illuminating and gratifying. 

Your arrival signpost for your own personal Fin del Mundo is very distinct—it is when you feel that there is no way forward, and no way back. Once you have reached this conclusion, you are at your Fin. The Spanish word “Fin” can be translated not only as "the end,” but also as the "edge.” This distinction allows one to traverse the terrain of the frontier because Fin is not a limit, but rather a barrier to be overcome.

Can you peer over the edge? Are you witness to your doubts and fears at the moment of your arrival there? Will you devise a way to cross the divide, to clear the barrier, despite all evidence that it may lead to your demise?

There is an old Native American saying which goes a long way toward explaining how tribes traversed their own frontiers, real and imagined: "Along the path in every person's life appears a chasm that looks too wide to cross. Leap. It's not as far as you think.”

Finding your Fin del Mundo and surviving the leap is about expanding the geography of your mind and your heart, pushing out those edges. The controversial but far-reaching Spanish king, Carlos V, who pushed the edges of humanity in the early 16th century while presiding over both the colonization of the New World and the Renaissance, had a personal moniker: Plus Ultra ("There is more"). This phrase calls to mind the courage to peer over one's own Fin del Mundo and make the leap. There is always more. No matter what you think you know, you don’t know all of it. No matter what has been done before, it has not all been done. There is no end—only an edge. Sometimes, a leap can get you to the other side.

Here, as we look ahead into fall— especially for those of us heading into new territories of school or university—perhaps we can take a moment to consider what we are leaping from, and to. I leave you with a verse from T.S. Elliot’s “The Four Quartets”:

We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time

Wishing you a good leap!