Just as not every ten kilometers of land are worth the same — even though they do measure exactly ten kilometers — identity is an illusion of perception. From a certain point of view, a thing is a thing, starting with itself, and that is the point of view of the given, of received evidence, which indeed imposes itself on us. And yet, from another point of view, no thing is truly a thing, and especially not the thing we believed it to be, and especially not itself.

Each moment — if we were to divide time a certain way — seems like the same as the one before, and the same again as the one after. If we could scrutinize them closely enough, all these moments lost in the detail of phenomena without memory, we would likely find that this is the case. And yet, it is not: everything resembles everything else, and nothing is the same.

That it’s necessary, for practical reasons, to refer everything back to the same standard — whether it be a meter or something else — does not mean that such measures carry any reality beyond the convention we create, receive, accept, pass on, and agree upon. Yet this point of view of the given is not only not the only possible one — it is, in fact, a somewhat crude one. It lacks nuance, knowledge of the terrain, understanding of gradients, experience of slopes, sensitivity to the edges.

One must have never run along coastal paths to believe, like Heraclitus, that the path going up is the same as the one going down. In truth, the turning back can be fateful — and it is not rare to find the descent down a steep trail far more violent than the climb. High and low are no more to be confused than they are to be considered alike — if we apprehend them in different ways, and differently each time, it is because they are incommensurable with the distant, faraway geography that has traced, in our minds as on maps, their definitive outline.

But what is more shifting than a path? Everything changes: depending on the weather, depending on the air, depending on the foot, depending on life, depending on function. One must philosophize like a donkey bearing its burden — with all the stubbornness and sensitivity to the terrain that the weight of living demands. For truly, that’s all there is to do: to the forward, to the forward, to the forward.