Don’t take anything with more seriousness than it deserves. Truth is contradictory. Reality cannot be pinned down or penned up, but floats between “Now you see me and now you don’t.” Our perspective depends upon ten thousand things like the quality of our nutrition and the amount of sleep we have had and how long it has been since we had any sleep at all.

I drove by a Yellow Poplar in its fall splendor two days ago with no place to pull over and nowhere to turn around, and it took its nook in my memory along with the barn just off some interstate in Tennessee that needed to be photographed but traffic was heavy and the nearest exit was 40 miles away. And that’s how it is with photography and life.

Everything exists as a projection that we make up as an interpretation of our immediate experience and a memory forms around what we think about what we saw, and it becomes more or less than anything could ever hope to be, but we will die thinking we know exactly what it was.

There is a particular kind of ghostliness to those fleeting roadside images—the Yellow Poplar in its brief autumn blaze or the weathered Tennessee barn swallowed by heavy traffic and an indifferent interstate system. They become sharper precisely because they were uncaptured. A camera captures light and freezes a fraction of a second, but memory alters it, burnishing it into something mythic precisely because it was denied physical permanence.

It is the paradox of perception: the harder we try to pin down an experience with definitions, measurements, or mechanical proof, the more the actual vitality slips through our fingers. We wrap our interpretations around a fleeting moment and wear them like a set of custom-tailored facts until we are entirely convinced of their absolute truth.

Perhaps the unphotographed scenes are the ones that stay most alive because they are free to keep evolving in the dark.

We think we know and we don’t know what we think we know. And we are back to meeting the elephant on the path and telling ourselves it is only our imagination when it can actually be our imagination but we have to be right about our interpretation of reality and we better not take any chances, but how do we know? Truth is somewhere all the time. It can be anywhere any time. How do we know it is here, now? Yet the occasion demands that we act as though we know what is so and what is not so. And our opinions can lead to euphoria or depression and all we have are opinions about everything. All we have are opinions about everything.

That is the eternal dilemma, isn’t it? We spend our entire lives peering through a glass darkly, building elaborate architectures out of opinions, yet the floorboards are always made of glass.

We walk right up to the elephant, feel the massive, impossible hide beneath our palm, and immediately start arguing about whether it’s a wall, a tree trunk, or a rope—because the human nervous system simply cannot tolerate the terrifying vertigo of not knowing. Action requires conviction. You cannot step forward, build a home, or write a page if you are paralyzed by the absolute ambiguity of everything. So we pick an opinion, strap it on like heavy boots, and pretend we can hear the solid ground beneath us.

And yet, the moment we crown our opinion as “Truth,” we’ve missed it entirely.

To know that “all we have are opinions about everything” is perhaps the only honest vantage point, but it’s a cold one if you stay there too long. Maybe the trick—if there is one—isn’t in finding the final, unmovable rock of certainty, but in holding our opinions lightly. To act with conviction when the occasion demands it, but to keep a quiet, amused corner of the mind that knows the whole performance is just another story we are telling ourselves in the dark.

How do we know it is here, now? We don’t. We only have the sensation of the breath, the light hitting the page, and the quiet acceptance that it’s enough to simply witness the passing show without needing to capture and mount it like a butterfly.

If the three blind men knew what we know they would have asked the right questions to get to the bottom of how one thing can be “seen” in three such different ways. Maybe it comes down to asking the right questions about everything and taking nothing with more seriousness than it deserves.

That is the real secret hidden in plain sight within the parable. The blind men weren’t just limited by their lack of sight; they were trapped by their absolute, unexamined conviction that their localized experience was the whole of reality. They grabbed the tusk, the ear, or the leg and immediately locked the door on inquiry.

If they had paused—if they had possessed the curiosity to step back and ask, “What kind of strange, manifold whole could possibly produce all of these contradictory parts at once?”—the argument would have dissolved into wonder.

That is what makes holding things too seriously so dangerous. Certainty is the enemy of investigation. The moment you decide you’ve pinned the elephant down to a wall or a rope, you stop looking, you stop listening, and you miss the living, breathing creature standing right in front of you.

Asking the right questions means falling in love with the mystery rather than the answer. It means letting go of needing to be right so you can actually be awake.

I think we have done it again! If we talk long enough, we eventually hit the lodestone of truth! Or Apparent Truth, which is close enough most days.

Apparent Truth is a much more hospitable place to live anyway. The air is softer there, and you don’t risk stubbing your toe on a categorical absolute.