Detours and Roads Untravelled

In a nature path, there are 'main roads' which are paved, and there are detours. One knows surely little about the detours, and there is always a risk that the end of those dirt paths, the person who started them wasn't able to finish. As some paths become more respectable (and repeatable), people are more likely to travel them, even when they already figured the destination beforehand. Knowing where to go simply feels more reassuring in the end.
   Reading the section from Master Sheng Yen's Orthodox Chinese Buddhism today about whether there is a soul or not, I reflect: how scary it is that the "soul" or "enduring personality", is none other than the paved road! It's the identity that I am so familiar with that I think that it stays with me forever. But in fact, this identity is hardly a long path that stretches to infinity. More so, it can be likened to a kind of small island which has accumulated certain habits over time: a kind of tributary that builds up certain kinds of natural sediments while others are eroded over time. This is none other than a path that, when trodden upon enough times or built up long enough, gives the illusion to the idea of a long-standing, enduring self: an identity or soul that is fixed across many lifetimes.
   To travel an unbeaten path is similarly risking the potential erasure of the self that I have been so familiar with, in favor of the more humbling "starting over", or perhaps more aware that every step can be a new one and can lead to an unexpected or much less certain result.