I have a neighbour and sitting next to their window is a cage with a beautiful green bird. I don’t know what type of bird it is but every time I step out, it shifts it’s position so that it can watch me. It cutely hops over and tilts it’s head ever so slightly to the right or left to make sure it gets a good look at me. I sometimes like to stare into it’s eyes and try to see how it may feel to be a bird. How it aimlessly hops around all day until one day it’ll finally be free to fly once again.
That bird was meant to be in the sky, not a cage.
Now, this experience had me thinking, what if I am more like this bird then at first glance? I know we can all relate to this experience of being cooped up, stuck, or even too tired to do anything else. I feel like we’ve slowly removed the inertia needed to actually spread our wings out wide and take flight into this world. Work can be done online, groceries can be delivered to your door, relationships can be maintained over the phone. Your life can be wholly lived without you ever having to step outside your home.
Now tell me…
How is that any different than my neighbours bird?
He also works at home, and gets food delivered right to his front door while never having to leave his cage. He may seem content because A) it’s a bird and B) we can’t exactly speak bird so how would we know if he was not content. However, there is a sneaky distinction, and that’s because we make the rationalization that the bird is stuck and we are not. That we have the power to leave whenever we wish. This may be true but is it the reality?
Say we opened up my neighbours bird cage and opened the window for him to fly out. Would he fly out? Would he leave the cage he has lived in all his life, with his multiple meals a day and safety? He won’t. He’s been conditioned to not even think of that possibility and more so to be scared of it. So, I'd imagine he would be pretty content sitting exactly where he originally was. The outside world is much too scary to leave even though his whole nature yearns for the experience to fly free.
How about us?
We can leave our homes whenever we want and really do whatever we want but is that a “right” that we exercise? We seemed inherently tied to the systems of thoughts and actions that we’ve developed over time. We wake up, eat more or less the same food and do more or less the same things. In our world teeming with infinite possibilities we’ve somehow managed to section a small part off for us to safely reside in.
Why?
What is the reason why we relish these predefined systems but not being open to the awesome reality of our universe? Who is it that is exactly “scared” of the latter? Some may say ego, others may say conditioning and others may simply be unable to provide an alternative, that’s how bad it can get. To proverbially be blindfolded all your life, to be walking but asleep at the same time. What’s so bad about waking up? What is in the way?
The human system is in the way. Through processes of industrialization, democratization, capitalism and other ideas have created an invisible “standard” for existing. Can you think how foolish that is? At first, you may not think it to be foolish at all but really consider that people live their lives at the mercy of an oligopoly of ideas. They have been born into, educated by and at the service to an inherently flawed system. Everyone else relishes ideas and the preexisting systems. Everyone else gets jobs, settles down somewhere and finds themselves stuck in the exact same cycle.
Why would we not do the same?
I think that’s where the problem lies. If everyone else is doing it and everyone else is telling you to do it then what chance do you really have to get out of that system?
The only way out is to nurture the natural curiosity within you.
Just like my neighbours bird who without fail would come over to investigate whenever I would come by. We must nurture this natural, innocent and completely vital skill. To be able to question each and everything we encounter in our lives to the point where we can see the stark differences between the reality and our perceptions. However, we must also have the serenity to be able to understand that this system exists just like how the weather exists and we wouldn’t try to change the weather right? So why try to change the whole system, the best you can do is to have the discipline to step out of the system and lead by example.
I guess this leads me to an “idea” that I would like to share.
Do Something You’ve Never Done Before Each Day
Let me explain. If we are stuck in these systems of thoughts and actions then we should try to observe what happens to our lives when we slowly start participating in completely different ways of thinking and action.
Do something you’ve never done before. If you’ve never baked, take some time out on Saturday and bake something. If you’ve never wrote a song, do that. If you’ve never went sky diving, give it a shot. Just one thing that is sufficiently different from your typical day.
Don’t make this an exercise in discipline though. Don’t say “I must do this.” instead ask “What is my intuition saying?” you’ll usually have a few ideas swimming around in your head. Then, make a mental or physical list of the activities or related of the things you enjoyed the most. The one thing you are simply itching to try again and slowly start to integrate that into your life.
Who knows? It may be what you were meant to do.
The important thing here is to try to feel yourself being pulled in by your curiosity to learn more and not being pushed by some insecure need to be doing something new.
To earnestly follow these new lines of thinking can lead you to the place where you need to go. Keep an open mind and experiment and see where you end up.
