One goal, many paths. If only the aphorism about many paths leading to mountain top, were as true as its popularity suggests. Perchance, if only it were as clear as its simplicity suggests. Perhaps, then, this — or any — life would surely be simpler and more manageable! As if our life were actually only a mountain for which there were but one peak, and it not a volcano. Alas — nay, thankfully — life is not a path to a goal.
There are many goals inherent in each path one finds and walks in any lived life — almost with each step and certainly, with each dream.
Each path is its own, transient, contextual, and not forever. Neither this nor that, and not not, either. To start a path, best have a goal (we say prudently). And what to do upon awakening already on a path — driven/goal — bound? There is no mountain but real mountains, and Sisyphus is allegorical. To start a life — now? And to return? Yet, how to start, and where, the first step — from/to — be it metaphorical, desperate or physical? Full, yet closed: obscure but clear: path no path. Life, now!
There is no returning — no going back — this has always been known by those who dwell in time.
Nothing exists by itself. There are dynamically more actual contexts than the entirety of those compiled by all human imagining, ever. How do we get to there, from here? What ‘there’ is that: we have divined it to be by wishing, longing, occasional thinking, remembering-imagining, arguing, propounding, desiring, willing and dreaming? What is it to act as if we know the path with all its folding, diverting, angling, just out of sightness, couched within that goal we dream of, without end? As if we know tomorrow? Who thinks they know today?
There are not now, and there never have been, any of the pretend-imagined demons at all (Descartes, Laplace, Nietzsche, Maxwell, biblical, religious texts, et. al.). There are demons, of course, and they are lodged within our very life and come from ourselves to ourselves — but no others. Fear those others not — for they are naught, but us bewitching ourselves! Of course, you will have noted that there is no good demon either. Craving and longing for it is one of our great deceptions.
Rest assured, this brief jotting is not the end of that — neither here, nor in life, nor elsewhere. And yet. we still act ‘as if’…
