Caviar Monkeys

If I were a monkey

who had been fed on caviar

for the first few years of my life

I could end up

spending the rest of a short life

holding out for caviar

refusing to find sustenance elsewhere

or I could learn to palate

other more humble flavours

from other sustaining foods

that would help me survive

and the reality is

that those more humble

maybe even mundane foods

would provide better nutrition for me

me, the little monkey

with a penchant for caviar

the luxurious foods

would have long term ill-effects

and I think this is the case

with significance

for this is the thing we are fed

in our early formative years

and we can end up hankering

after continued significance

starving ourselves

of the ordinary satisfactions

that initially taste too bland

even, too repulsive to stomach

and we get the gag reflex

because something in our mind

has already chosen the repulsion

and has us gagging

and so, we hanker for the luxury and starve

or
we learn to live more ordinary lives

Better the Devil you Know

The essential difference between an escape and a distraction is to do with location. With an escape, you go somewhere else, but, with a distraction you stay right there where you are.

Many people that think they are escaping, are simply engaging in the act of distracting. This is so, because, there are no easy ways out. There are no get-out-of-jail-free cards in life outside the illusion. In a world where the jails, are the lives we have created and maintained for ourselves, and the bars of the cell are our behaviours...freedom can only exist in change of habit.

With a distraction, we don't go anywhere, we just whirl stuff around in front of ourselves to take our focus off where we are standing. As soon as the distraction has lost its momentum, we get the dawning realisation about where we are, and see that we haven't budged an inch, and start feeling anxious and hungry for another distraction.

We might call our distractions 'escapes', hoping to convince ourselves that we have gone somewhere else altogether different, when this is rarely the case.

In the movie Collateral, Jamie Foxx's character in the movie, is a taxi driver who has fooled himself into thinking he is escaping his life-as-it-is, when actually he is hooked on his life-as-it-is. His behaviours are so fixed and unchanging, that he appeases himself by staring at a postcard of a sunny destination. This is a destination he will never arrive at because he is distracting himself. Distracting himself enough, so that he can avoid the difficult and daunting movement that freedom necessitates.

But, what is he, and what am I, and what are we distracting ourselves from?

Change

Terrorised by the devil we don't know

People don't want freedom, they want comfort

Or, at least, they want both,

and for the most part

will sell their freedom in exchange

for the subtle lure of comfort

and true escape and true change

will only come

when we put freedom over comfort

when the devil we know

is killing us slowly with boredom

maybe its time to take a ride

with the devil we don't know