Breathing Room

  There’s a light-hearted (and thoroughly apocryphal!) story about a man out hunting in rugged countryside. As he pushes his way through deep undergrowth he stumbles and suddenly, to his horror, finds himself slipping over a bluff. His rifle flies in one direction, his pack in another, and he goes straight down. In desperation he manages to grab hold of a tree branch growing out of the side of the cliff. There he is, dangling precariously over a hundred-metre drop onto jagged rocks. He looks up and realizes he can never make it back to the top. There’s nothing to grip onto and the cliff face is crumbling and unstable. He looks down and nearly passes out with fright. He could never survive the fall. In panic he calls out, “Help, help! Is anybody there?” It’s an instinctive reaction. He knows he’s far from any human assistance. Not surprisingly, then, he nearly falls off the branch when a voice from above booms back, “I’m here. What do you want?” The man can’t figure out where exactly th