What Accompanies My Journey

A centipede is hiking up a treadmill. He doesn’t know what for, but
watching the counter going up makes him feel at the same time
accomplished and urgent for more.

The centipede sometimes pauses to reflect what the counting up could
mean. Maybe at 100,000 something would happen (only 7,399 ticks
away!).

Or maybe not. Maybe there’s nothing to its counting up. Maybe it’s
just walking and walking, and there’s no end to it.

This idea depresses the centipede. He would stop walking, count his
feet, and for a long time, untie and retie his shoes. After his shoes
were retied, he would feel perfect again.

The counting up may not mean anything, but it is the surest thing. How
silly, he would think, to have stopped walking.

Usually the young centipede would walk a long time before feeling the
need to pause. But these past months, many pebbles somehow got in his
shoes. First a pebble in the 36th shoe down to the right, then one
41st down to the left, then one 10th down the left… He kept taking
these pebbles out, but they kept showing up!

He’s had enough. He smells with his tentacles the pebble that he just
took out of his shoe (a jagged one 88th down to the right). He doesn’t
like how it smells.

“What do you want from me?” he asks the pebble.

Look at me.
Revel in me.
Find meaning in me.

The pebble seems to say.

“But you are making me miserable. My feet are blistered. What can you
possibly mean for me?”

Find comfort in me.