Our Beautiful Cages

They tend to be so pretty at times we can't see them, we spent most of our life decorating their walls, adding intricate elements to hide the rust of the metal, because we will do whatever it takes to pretend we don't live in one. That thought is too depressing to bare, Don't you think?


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The illusion

I'm attentively listening to a good friend, he is upset and exhausted, he feels like life has betrayed him in ways that he can't describe or even justify, and as he stares at a wall with eyes holding back tears, he tells me how much he misses his peace. I'm intrigued, I can't help but to question his concept of peace, his idea of what "should be" and how he landed head first onto bitter uncertainty.

"Everything was perfect... but it was taken from me" He says as he lights up a third cigarette in a row. "I've worked my whole life to get to this moment, to build what you see, only to have one person destroy it all and this..... this.... I can't forgive"

Looking at my surroundings I can't help but to notice the metal bars for the first time since our conversation started. "I think you should take a trip, spend some time a way from all this, clear you head, do some inner searching as they call it " I said with a smile, but the reply I heard just added more rust to the already crimson bars "I can't, I have too many things that depend on me, I can't leave, it does not work like that, you would not understand".

You would not understand

That's the power of illusions, they are designed to protect themselves and their most powerful trick is to root inside our mind deep "denial". Truth be told, I don't really understand, I'm not him, I'm just me and for all that I can see and feel, there is much more that hides behind masks of apparent strength and simulated confidence. Not that I blame anyone for this, I don't even blame society, this just seems to be the way we deal with our illusions, the way we try to justify our beautiful cages.

"Do I live in one too?" is the thought that hijacks my brain as I'm attempting to stay awake past my regular bedtime. After all, the whole idea of these cages is that they are invisible if you are the one who lives inside them... so I could be living in one myself and be oblivious to it. All I can say is that I've been looking around since that day, I've been attempting to see the rust of the bars, they might be there, they just might.

You know what I'm talking about, right? I mean, you've seen someone stuck before, they can't leave the job they hate, they can't leave their unfair spouse, they struggle to find meaning to the day to day, but to you, to you it's not that complicated. You see the cage, you tell him or her.... "listen... it's OK, you can move on, you can let go, you can be you, its OK I will still love you and appreciate you" but none of that registers, none of that lands in fertile soil.... Why? Because... you would not understand.... that's why.

But I don't live in a cage

I know you believe that, I know you are being honest and if I was to use a fancy machine you would probably convince me, after all I like science too. But does that mean it's true, does that mean that if something was to happen to your life, if a quake was to shake its foundation you would be ready to move on, to leave if you had to, to exit.

That's what I'm trying to find out, I'm trying to find out if we all live in a cage, if we all establish rules for ourselves that not only define the basic things like our ethics and our moral code, but our world of interaction and our geographical confinement. What prevents you or me from moving to a different land? What says you must not change too much, because if you do, you can be lost? I can't find these rules anywhere and curiously some of the people that we seem to admire, look up to, never seem to have lived by any of them.

Well, it could be something else I guess, It could be not a cage but a padded room, and to many of us, the safety of that environment, the ability to fallback into complacency and not break a bone is more than enough reason to be happy with the door being locked from the inside and the key being lost. What door you ask? All cages have doors, all rooms have them, Could it be a cage without one?

If I stepped out

I wonder what would happen, would I even be in this same house, would I be still in this country staring at TV's that anger me wondering why we can't have world peace. Maybe one day I'll wake up and realize the door was always open and every time I thought there was no way to leave, it was just because I had stepped outside of it for a second and the view scared me, unknowns are scary and we know nothing about what's outside our beautiful cages, we don't want to know.