Because the reason people do not escape terrible situations is very rarely that any single next step is impossible.

It is that they look at the entire distance — the whole divorce, the whole recovery, the whole rebuilding of a life from nothing at forty — and the size of it is so crushing that they never take the first inch at all.

The mountain range defeats you before you have moved, if you insist on staring at the mountain range.

But no one crosses a mountain range.

They cross the next few feet of it, and then the next, and the range gets crossed as a byproduct of a thousand small refusals to quit.

On that garage floor I could not have survived the thought of the whole ordeal that was coming — the police, the investigation, the trial, the divorce, the debt, the surgeries still ahead, the slow terrible work of physical therapy, the even slower work of learning to trust my own judgment again after years of being told it was broken.