A bar-tailed godwit flies over a week nonstop across the Pacific. Some seasons you just have to keep flapping.

Something lighter than a bag of sugar crosses an ocean without landing, not through anything dramatic but by keeping up an unremarkable motion for a very long time. Some stretches of a year work like that. There is no clever solution available and no halfway landing spot, just the same effort repeated past the point where it still feels like progress.

If you are in one of those stretches, shrink the unit. Today’s flapping is today’s whole job. Save the question of how much is left for a day when you are not mid-ocean.