Sarah was walking in the sand dunes on a sunny winter’s day. She climbed up for the view across the bay, and the wind blew cold onto her face and hands. It was rather too bracing.  Best to descend. She found the relics of an old boardwalk. The paint was flaking off and the slivers of metal holding the struts together were corroding.  She followed the boardwalk for awhile, touching each slat, thinking about the folk who had stepped there too - either daintily or heavily. Suddenly the boardwalk stopped, trailed off. It was a very low tide, and the sand stretched seemingly endlessly on either side. Once she stepped off the slats, she would be walking where the sea would soon be roaring in.

Ah, Sarah said to herself, life’s like that. The platitude  of her own utterance made her smile. It seemed true enough though. Certainly her own life had contained many paths that had come to nothing: the friendships that had trailed off into the sand, the loves that had not survived the rigorous light of day, the ideas that  had proved flimsy in the long run.  That had all taught her that nothing was permanent, and she had grown to supect that the world generally settles back into entropy. This had led her to the flinty conclusion that if things could go wrong, they would.  

Hang on, Sarah thought. There’s another way of looking at this. What if the established path, rickety as it was, ceased because no-one had dared to step off it, or because new experience leaves no footprints and requires no reassurances? What if a new, a really new, way of thinking and feeling was like plunging into the sea or jumping out of a plane with an untried parachute? And not relying on the paths and methods that you had used before?

That was irrational, of course. To take risks. To ignore precedent. to be new, to be one hand clapping. To step off the path. Sarah knew she’d found something. It was a Koan, of sorts.