Journey, JH Park

There is a film from my twenties that has never quite left me: Gattaca. One line from it has settled into my daily life, the way a melody does—quietly, stubbornly, and inescapably.

“I never saved anything for the swim back.”

I still remember the first time it landed. Not understood — landed, the way certain sentences bypass the brain and go straight for the chest.

In many ways, to someone navigating a heavily tilted playing field—a perpetual underdog playing with a stacked deck—the film felt less like a story and more like a private revelation.

It delivered a brutal but liberating truth: to claim anything of substance against impossible odds—whether to seize a victory or merely inch closer to a desperate ambition—you must surrender yourself entirely to the present tense. It demands a full, unhesitating sprint forward, anchored by the resolve that there will be no return voyage. You leave nothing in reserve. And only when you’ve burned yourself down to white ash does something impossible become possible.

A lot of time has passed since I first watched the film. In some respects, I’ve crossed to the other side — closer now to the establishment than the underdog I once was. I hold cards I didn’t used to hold. And yet. The fight hasn’t ended; it has only changed shape. I am still, in the ways that count, an underdog.

Before the mind can paralyze itself with the cold calculus of how to win, the body must answer first. “I never saved anything for the swim back.” At forty, this is still the only sentence I lean on. The one I return to when the math doesn’t work and the odds don’t care.

Baseball gives me a metaphor I can live with. In the bottom of the ninth, when the closer takes the mound, no one expects him to hold anything back. Each pitch is thrown as if it’s the only one that matters. And I’ve found myself wanting to live with that kind of focus—only not for a single inning. From the first to the last. No conservation. No pacing for later.

That, to me, is what it means to live without regret.

Nothing saved for the swim back.