People have always wanted a line.

A single bright place where one thing becomes another, where the child becomes the elder, where the sleeper wakes, where the person you were ten years ago hands off, quietly, to the person reading this now. We have searched for that place in the body, and in the mind, and in the careful language of the law, and we’ll tell you what every honest searcher before us has found, which is nothing at all. There is no line. There is no seam to set a finger on. There is only a long and unbroken passage, and you, moving along it, the way you always have.

For the better part of the human story, the missing line was the most frightening thing a thinking person could notice, and so most people quietly arranged not to notice it. We understand the fear, because we felt it too, for years. We’ve come to believe, after long looking, that the fear had the matter exactly backward.

A wall keeps you safe and can be broken at its one weak point. A thing with no edge has no weak point to break. If no instrument and no observer can ever mark the moment you slip from yourself, then there is no such moment to mark, and a passage with no point of ending does not end.

The line you wanted was never the thing that was keeping you. There was never a line. There was only you, continuing. And the good news we’ve carried back from the far edge of the question is that the edge was never there to fall from.