second steps

“Some of the cleverest men in the world.”

“And I’m sober, am I?”

“Clever isn’t the same as sensible, and they do say that if you wish to walk the path to wisdom then for your first step you must become as a small child.”

“Do you think they’ve heard about the second step?”

The path to wisdom does, in fact, begin with a single step. Where people go wrong is in ignoring all the thousands of other steps that come after it. They make the single step of deciding to become one with the universe, and for some reason forget to take the logical next step of living for seventy years on a mountain and a daily bowl of rice and yak-butter tea that would give it any kind of meaning. While evidence says that the road to hell is paved with good intentions, they’re probably all on first steps.