Destiny Optional

One thing about conventional wisdom: It never tells you anything that's in any way surprising, unless you're walking around with your head in the sand, which isn't even a very sensible metaphor anyhow.
But life is full or surprises, sort of a years-long sequence of themes and variations, with the same people over and over again, but doing things that you'd never have expected them to do, but that they may have dreamed of doing for as long as you've known them. Or thought you did.

I am thinking now of one of those crossroads that somehow makes itself apparent just when you think you're on the only, steady, straight-ahead highway to the horizon. Hurtling along on smooth-polished rails, you think, with a close group of companions on mostly-parallel paths. But then you take your eye off the horizon for a moment, and when you look back up the train is a shambles, still, missing wheels and rails and any sense of direction, current or former. It's as if a glamour has been withdrawn, and you see the carriage clearly: dusty, half on its side, windows broken out, scant shreds of upholstery hanging from the skeletons of old seats.

And no one else seems to be there. Nor any sign of them--where they were, where they went, what went on during that moment of lapse that seems now to have been something close to an eternity.

Imagine Tutankhamen, seeing all the goings-on in his tomb, a thousands-of-years instant after having been sealed up, his slaves close to hand, his brains packed neatly in a jar nearby, and now a sudden shaft of dust-moted light stabs through his peaceful, long-uninterrupted rest. Then noises, strange languages, and so many eyes and hands, some curious, some greedy, some flat-out amazed at the wealth and bounty that will not, clearly, accompany young T to any next kingdom, but will instead be divided among scientists, collectors, museums, thieves, only to be brought back together, at least in part, every now and then, to be toured around the great cities of the world, cities far beyond the like of Thebes or even Alexandria, where gasping mourners will walk down endless, corded, funerary lanes for just a brief glimpse of his own remains, wrapped in ancient linen, and beside him the stock and treasures that had been his silent companions for so many dark millennia.

Now, that's a derailment.