Nor if he had decided to get to the mountaintop shrine quickly and most efficiently ;-)

It's a never ending theme for meditation. I personally have been tying it with the figuration phenomenon JMG talks about on his other essay. Not only is the future unmanageable but everything is, not because you can't do a good job of predicting what will you see in the kitchen if you go grab a coffee, but because you are making it up and then claiming you could predict it after all.