Imagine you go on a solo trip to a different country. You want to have a good time exploring the mountain roads and the views. You want to interact with the local people and learn about them. You want to get in touch with yourself and rejuvenate. You are excited and you rent out a car for a week. Given that you’re fairly adventurous, you decide to drive in the wilderness and explore some uncharted territory. Now you are on your own, driving a car, in an unknown place. After a few hours, you decide to pause. You are at an intersection, now there are multiple paths forward and you have no clue where each of them goes. You’re not sure what to do next. You’re still excited by the prospect but need someone to guide you or give you an input here.

You look around and you find two people sitting down and having a casual chat. You drive up to them and say, “Hey, I’m new here and I’m looking for someone to guide me on my path ahead. Can you help me?”

Both of them reply that they can and ask you to try out what they have to offer. You invite the first one into your car, and they sit down in the passenger seat beside you. This person has been on one of these paths before. In fact, they live in a small village down one of the paths, and have spent the majority of their life treading up and down that one path. They tell you all about that path, where to take which turn, the kind of obstacles you will face, where the road is patchy, what happens if it rains, and how to deal with the wild animals that might bump into you from time to time. They tell you about the views you’ll see when you get to the village and the good food you can have. They give you tips and advice on how to go down that path, and offer to be by your side as you move forward. They’ve lived on this road for decades and you tell yourself that you can follow their guidance.

You thank this person and invite the second one into the car. As the second person sits in the passenger seat beside you, they ask you why you’re here and what makes you ask for their help. As you explain that this is uncharted territory and you don’t know which path to take and where each path takes you, they listen. You in turn ask them which of these paths they are an expert on. They reply back saying, “How does that matter?”.

You are now slightly taken aback, and you say, “But the other person really knew about the first path and they could tell me all about it. I even got advice on what to do and they offered me to show the path they’ve taken.” They get curious and ask you if any two people’s paths are ever the same. You fall back into your seat and reflect for a moment on that. After a few minutes, you tell them that actually you’re here for the adventure and that you’d like to have a good time, but are overcome by confusion and fear. As they listen, they get more curious and ask you what the immediate next thing you want to do is. You tell them that you need to pick a path and you want to know which one to pick. They point you to the GPS in your car and say, “that will tell you which one to pick”. You’ve heard of this GPS before and you used to spend a lot of time with it when you were a kid, happily roaming around. You’re surprised to see that it still exists, even in a foreign country, even in a new car, but you’ve somehow forgotten how it exactly works.

They explain to you how the GPS works and how it tells you exactly which turn to take and when to take it. They reveal that they can tell you what they’re personal GPS says, but that would be irrelevant because where you’ll go has nothing to do with where they’ve been in the past. You are intrigued but you are still unsure and afraid. You haven’t seen a GPS in many years and you remember times when it led you into dead-ends. You tell this person that you don’t trust it fully. They offer to be in the passenger seat as you follow your GPS and re-point you back to it whenever you feel unsure. “What if the roads are patchy?”, you ask them. They point you to the spare tire in the car. You exclaim, “But what if I get tired?”. They point out that you told them you’re here to have fun, and not just get somewhere and get it done with. “What if I run out of fuel on the path the GPS tells me to take?”, you ask. They point you to the solar panel on the top of your car.