Night comes before day, pain before pleasure, confusion before wisdom. So too, the way this world was made, there is no journey forward without first a step backward.

So it is with all creatures. But we human beings, we strive not only to move forward, but to leap beyond our own nature, beyond any nature at all.

We, too, must first step back before we can leap upward. But since our leap is beyond nature, we fall, too, beneath our nature.

That is sin—a fall beneath your own nature, as one who crouches before he leaps.

And that is the power of return
—to leap beyond any bounds at all.