text: Three men sat together for tea. A simple fisherman, a wise sage, and a man thought to be the most enlightened man in all the lands. The first two were old friends and spoke freely. The third simply sipped his tea and listened, as one might expect from a man so wise. The first man sighed and looked at the others. “My friends, I feel as though I am trapped. The mistakes I have made are like shackles, and I can never escape them. No matter what I do now, the past cannot be changed. Once a moment has past it is gone. Even the ones that feel close enough to touch are air when I try to grasp them, though they bind me like iron. I thought perhaps ones such as you could help me learn to accept the cage I find myself in and know peace.” The second man smiled and said “there is no need to accept a cage when you can escape it my friend. You see time like a great beast, gobbling up the moments of the past so only their echoes remain. But time is like a river, and once you see it, you can begin to learn how to swim.” So he took his friends hand and brought him back through the river of time to his youth, and showed him all the secrets he knew. And the fisherman saw the river, and thus he learned to swim. Together, they returned to the moment of the tea they had been having. “I can never thank you enough my friend” the fisherman said, embracing the sage as a brother, “you have shown me more of the world than I ever imagined existence, and freed me from the cruel prison of time.” Then for the first time, the third man spoke. “It is a powerful truth you have discovered, even if it is a lie.” “A lie,” the other two exclaimed, “how could it be a lie? We see the river of time before us and we swim in it’s currents.” “You see a single thread and think it the whole tapestry. The truth is that there are an infinite number of universes, where every possible event occurs. Everything you could ever imagine and an infinite number of possibilities you could not. And each of us is nothing more than a point of view. You do not go back in time and change what you have done, you simply choose to view a reality where things played out differently.” Turning to the first man, he laughed, a hollow sound bereft of mirth. “You were closer to the truth, for at least you knew you were trapped, even if you could not see the cage. For the terrible truth is this: you control nothing in this world or any other. Everything that might occur does, and though I can choose to experience anything possible, I control none of it. There is nothing new, nothing old, everything simply is.” And because an infinite lifetime of powerlessness had ground his soul to dust, and the only thing he could still feel was the pain of others, he chose to view a world where his words awoke this final enlightenment in the other two, and in sudden horror they fled this reality, screaming in the vaults of their minds and beating at the walls of cage they had never before felt, a cage that could never be escaped because it encompassed everything that ever could be. And the third man chose to view a world where the fleshy machine he was riding gave a cold, cruel smile.