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Crossing Paths, No Path

Diverging, converging, criss-crossing, these paths we make;
and there is no path after all.

The shuttle bus stopped, and two girls alighted. As soon as they were on the ground, they began chatting while continuing the journey to their destination. I caught a fragment of that scene as the rear door of the bus slid closed, and the vehicle, with others and me in it, moved on.

At that time, I thought, "This is where our paths part, them and us." Our paths had crossed and parted; my path crossed another's path yet again, and surely so did theirs. I thought of the infinite criss-crossings of the infinitely many paths; then it occured to me that I might have been wrong.

Our paths might not have parted then and there, because what they did afterwards might just in some ways affect what happened to me and vice versa, even when we were not at the same location and didn't even know each other. We in the very least went to the same university. I thought of my family then, and I thought, even when we were far apart from each other, what happened to any of us would affect the others greatly.

In a large scale, a war or a pact may happen because of one person's decision in one particular country, and yet many other people in various other places feel the impact. Their paths have abstractly met. Then, how should I define this 'path'? Certainly encounters are not sufficient.

As long as we're breathing the same air (and yet different particles of them...) in the same universe (and perhaps alternate universes as well?), it should be quite inevitable that what one does will affect others in some ways big or small. So I thought, was there such a thing as 'path' anyway? The earth we walk on is one whole curved plane. Roads are there simply because someone has flattened the surface and put a different patching on that particular piece of the land. There are countless roads we can make yet, aren't there?

I think that this may be what is meant by the saying "We are not independent but interdependent." We are interconnected in so many visible and invisible ways that drawing a clear line between my path and your path will perhaps be quite meaningless. Depending on how we view it, there may be infinitely many paths diverging, converging, crisscrossing randomly (and yet not randomly, perhaps? Chaos is a theory after all); or there may be no path at all -- both on this one-and-the-same, infinite space that we share.

17 February 2004