GO HONESTLY
or go home.
There is little as disheartening as plunging heedless, headlong, into the wine-dark sea, rolling with the motions of a tempest of surnatural proportions, and finding that the eternal ocean lacks the power to saturate your skin, chill your bones and freeze your flesh and instead has merely succeeded in dampening your spirits.
The worst part of getting lost in the woods after finding, and losing, several paths and finally seeking your own through treacherous ferns, mouldering logs, impenetrable shrubs and spongy peat is the point where you part two dense thickets and stumble, suddenly blinded, onto a wide paved road.
Any sense of relief you may derive from not having your expectations, even anticipations, lived up to, is a sad attempt to fool yourselves into supposed superiority and a warping of our original subconscious desires. We walk away from the path because we want to surrender to the unknown that surrounds - forgo our artificial lives and exit wounds for the curves and arteries of a system beyond us and anything we could create. The only pleasure that can be obtained from a surprising exit is the thought that you - in actuality blind and unwitting - have managed to navigate - by chance, of course - through a maze - in which you had hoped to be lost forever!
Only when we have at last absolved ourselves of any responsibility as to our final destination may we impartially view the final exit. One who is resigned to spending the rest of their days as a hermit, a wild man of the woods, feels no relief in the escape of that which they no longer dread.
Only one who is pushed unwillingly into the drink will be happy to find the fluid less of a shock to the system. The one who jumps in of his own free will searches for a cathartic purge, and will be forced to look elsewhere for the yin to his yang.
If you want something, you should crave it so much that you will keep searching should you not find that what you hoped for. Getting a mere taste and feigning relief at the dilution is cheap voyeurism and belittles us all.
Next time I go for a walk in the woods, I'm not coming back.