At the fork

The vessel is stalling.

...Which one is it?

The seaway ahead has suddenly forked into three passages, each pointing in three separate directions. Three! Two you can understand - but three? It's even worse than none at all!! At the edge of the furcation all three passages seem bona fide, and yet taking any one of them would mean abandoning the other two. You wouldn't think twice about choosing if it's absolutely the phonies that you're abandoning...

Passage One leads to an unfinished Past.

Passage Two leads to an immediate Present.

Passage Three leads to an unknown Future.

And each of them has desire written all over... How on the high seas is a sailor supposed to make up his mind?

If you look carefully you would see that the fork is nothing but a three-headed snake monster hellbent to mislead. For three choices cannot be choice at all. It's nothing but a giant, glistening deception.

The land-dwellers have a name for this: backed against a wall.