Franz Kafka | Anniversary of the author's death – 3 June 1924 A chess player abandons a winning-looking attack because the position demands a retreat. A scientist abandons a familiar theory after years of defending it. A person leaves a secure career to pursue a path that seems, from the outside, like a step backward. These moments share a strange pattern: progress sometimes begins with an action that appears to move in the wrong direction.Franz Kafka’s line, “There are some things one can achieve only by a deliberate leap in the opposite direction,” captures this paradox. The sentence suggests that…