Life is often framed in the metaphor of the long journey to a destination. This is a useful simplification, as it allows for many further metaphorical framings. In life, you must choose between paths when you arrive at a fork in the road, you encounter and surmount obstacles and opponents, you may have a variable pace depending upon your motivation or whether you know where you're going, and above all, you must choose a destination and judge whether the paths you have chosen shall lead you there. The metaphor even allows for elaborations upon the content of the destination itself, be it the endless void of feeling and thought predicted by lone science, or the undying torment, elation, or continual rebirth of feeling and thought predicted by other belief systems.
For my purposes I will tailor this metaphor thusly: first, that in our lives we choose paths continuously rather than discreetly at given intervals as a man walking through the woods on a well-trod path might be envisioned to choose. At each moment we may choose to sit down or stand, to be silent or to scream out some irretractable remark, and each decision, a decision that sends us down one of these continuously branching and occasionally yet only ever contingently intersecting time paths, is however imperceptibility distinct from the path beside it that may differ if only by a word left out or a glance ungiven.
