Mirrors 2

We are all free. Most people simply prefer not to be, without realizing it. Obligations, responsibilities, possessions, and cages are all much easier than freedom. That is always the most difficult part of creation, the blank page, the empty canvas, the silence, all that crushing freedom. It’s madness. We constantly gripe that greater freedom is what we need to achieve happiness. Life’s hooks have snared us and are restraining us from achieving the grandeur for which we were certainly destined. Once cut loose, most people crumple like balled-up paper. If we are honest with ourselves, we will admit that we prefer the security and predictability of the restraints. There is safety in cages. They create the point of reference from which one can see the landscape of everything that they are not. Much like the giant children that we all really are, everything that we are not is everything that we want. We want to be precisely and only what our cage will not accommodate. So we push, struggle, and cavort against it to gain freedom and access to what we are not. Most of us can’t escape. Some do, and some are removed from their cages against their will. Once out, cocks fall limp, pulse rates climb, and fear and panic set in. Man is an animal no longer fit to be free. We’re like an inmate who’s been inside too long to know how to function on the outside. It’s neither good nor bad. It simply is. Outstanding individuals adapt to and excel within this new freedom, and ultimately live happily ever after, amen. It makes the rest of us writhe with jealousy, contempt, and pseudo-moral outrage. Pseudo-moral posturing abounds as we criticize and condemn those fit for what we want but cannot achieve. We trip over our pride and our own feet as we stumble, crying, screaming, and looking foolish. Ultimately failing, disappointing, and underachieving. By definition, not everybody can be exceptional. Eventually, mediocrity, complacency, and stability find you again, sobbing like a child, a little more shaken up than last time. Sometimes it leaves you better or worse than the time before. Either way, you’ll do it again. None of us are really that bright. We’ll dance like this until we drop. We’ll continue painting, writing, lifting weights, breaking mirrors, singing off-key, chasing pussy, making wars, and intellectualizing over dumb shit. It’s predictable and safe. Like a cage. It’s what we do.