That's a very loose paraphrasis of a famous passage from Dante's Inferno, which I'll now cite (from Dorothy Sayers's translation.) Dante opens:

Midway this way of life we’re bound upon,
I woke to find myself in a dark wood,
Where the right road was wholly lost and gone.

It was from C. S. Lewis's That Hideous Strength that I first picked up the allusion, and thus became haunted (back in 1994-5 or so, a very unhappy period of my life) with the notion that I had in fact lost the true way.

Was there really One Way? It seems as though there is. The notion of a "Path of Heaven" has come to me from so many different sources that I feel now there's truth in it, although it's certainly not the "God's plan for your life" that so many different hucksters try to sell. As I've come to understand it, the Path of Heaven is a very complex thing indeed and yet also simple. It's like membership in the Mandelbrot Set, I daresay: both something quite definite (either a point in the complex plane is in the Mandelbrot Set, or it isn't) and yet difficult to work out in practice, especially if you're _near_ the Path of Heaven.

Anyway, I now try to walk the Path of Heaven, or at least to walk within sight of it. There's something to be gained for being off to the side a little bit (as I'm in the habit of doing, in real life, when walking on RL paths.)

~Chara of Pnictogen