There came a generation that did not know what had been avoided.
They read old records and found gaps where conclusions should have been. They noticed how often decisions ended with for now. Some of them found this unsettling. Others found it honest.
A few tried to finish the work—to write the final law, the perfect system, the answer that would quiet the noise.
They failed.
Not because they were foolish, but because the world had learned how to resist completion. Every clean solution produced new questions. Every rigid structure met lives that bent it out of shape.
So people adjusted again.
They made smaller promises. Shorter plans. Agreements that assumed revision. Responsibility moved sideways, not upward.
Once, an old traveler told a group of students a story about a man who refused to rule and changed everything by doing so.
"Is it true?" a student asked.
The traveler shrugged. "True enough to work."
That was the standard now.
And so the world continued—not guided, not saved, not finished—carried forward by people who understood that choosing again was not a failure of the past…
…but its inheritance.