Between the sun and the sea

How high is too high? And how low is too low?

How high is too high?

It is a question that blares alarm bells in one’s head — overreaching, wanting too much, daring beyond what is safe. A kind of question that comes with warnings, with stories, with consequences already written into it. But no one really asks the second half.

How low is too low?

I was preparing for my exam tomorrow, and out of nowhere I started thinking about Icarus. But not in the way that we were taught to… not as a cautionary tale about pride, arrogance, recklessness, or the fatal flaw of wanting more than you should. But as a boy, who was given two limits, not one.

“Don’t fly too close to the sun, you’ll melt your wings,” his father said. He also said, “Don’t fly too close to the sea.”

Daedalus warned Icarus to stay in the “golden mean”, where the sun’s heat cannot melt the beeswax, and the sea’s humidity and salt spray cannot soak it.

But somewhere along the way, why did we decide that only one of the warnings mattered? We remember the sun because it’s dramatic. Because it’s bright and blinding and poetic in the way it destroys him. Because there’s something almost admirable about reaching too high, about failing because you dared.

But the sea?

The sea is quieter. The sea doesn’t burn, no… it drags. It weighs you down slowly. It softens your wings until you can’t stay up anymore. There’s nothing heroic about that kind of fall. Nothing memorable about choosing safety and still losing.

And maybe that’s why we don’t talk about it. Because it’s easier to forgive ambition than it is to forgive stagnation.

It’s easier to understand someone who tried too hard than someone who, for whatever reason, never tried enough. And maybe that’s why I couldn’t stop thinking about this story. Because it doesn’t offer a clear warning. Because it refuses to offer one.

Because what does it actually ask of us? What does it want to preach? To stay in the middle? To measure every moment? Every desire? Every risk? To ALWAYS know how far is too far?

The space between the sun and the sea sounds safe in theory. Balanced. Sensible. Controlled. But you know what it also is? Uncertain.

It demands a kind of awareness that is almost impossible to possess. To rise, but not woo much; to hold back, but not too often. To want, but not excessively. To be careful, but not afraid.

Because the line… the thin line between ambition and excess is never constant. It is ever-changing. What feels reaching one day can feel like restraint the next. What feels enough never quite stays that way.

And so, once again, the question keeps returning. How high is too high? And more unsettlingly, How low is too low?

And to me, this is exactly where the story stops feeling distant.

Because it is easy to understand the pull of the sun. The desire to go further, to do more, to not settle for the version of yourself that feels unfinished. There is something almost instinctive about it — the need to push, to prove, to reach.

But even in this reaching, there lingers a strange dissatisfaction. This feeling — as if no matter how high the flight is, it never quite counts as enough.

Well, maybe… that is its own kind of danger? Not the fall that comes from flying too high, but the inability to recognise where you already are. Because what does it mean to keep pushing, and still feel that you are somehow, somewhere, falling short? To move, constantly… and yet feel as though you are standing still?

And here somewhere; between the fear of burning out and the fear of never quite taking off, there lies this uneasy feeling of unrest. A kind that isn’t dramatic enough to be called a tragedy. Not still enough to be called safety.

Just the lingering sense of not knowing where you are in the sky. And whether, wherever you are, is it already too much? Or somehow still not enough?