Breaking our bonds
Vasily Kandinsky - Free Curve to the Point - Accompanying Sound of Geometric Curves 1925
This process of the good life is not, I am convinced, a life for the faint-hearted. It involves the stretching and growing of becoming more and more of one's potentialities. It involves the courage to be. It means launching oneself fully into the stream of life. Carl Rogers
Bounded. Meaning requires us to have some sort of boundary or bond in order that we can wrestle and fight against them. In lieu of a deeper meaning in life the bondage of duty ties us to a purpose that suppresses the devil’s of our darker nature. This bondage attracts and focuses the minds attention, quieting that incessant voice that is so fixated on sabotaging noble plans made in faith. The bounding of time allows us to enjoy the free time that we do have for ourselves. Remove the bondage of our time and we wander aimlessly through the desert of our thoughts. Removing our bonds we escape the tyranny of drudgery only to find ourselves lost in freedom. In our dreary doing we can rail against the yoke of our necessity, whilst dreaming of a utopia of creativity and autonomy. We can feel righteous in our rejection of the herd, rejection of bondage, walking off with our head held high into the gloriously imagined future, free to craft a life that doesn’t require us to give up our dignity. As soon as we are confronted with this wide expanse of time we find that instead of relishing the innumerable possibilities, we are paralysed by them and those brightly lit uplands of our imagined future begin to be obscured by the brewing storm of our flailing ego.
The only cure for this is to struggle against and with the ego that wishes for the path of least resistance, for expediency! To remember there is a reason why so few people break from the herd, namely because it carries risk and difficulty, the difficulty that comes with fighting the devil in your mind, the devil that always takes the opposing view to any notions you might have of carving your own path, of truly living. Our inability to consciously live without distracting ourselves with soul sapping work and mindless amusements is a learned habit of existence that becomes very difficult to break. There is a comfort in giving up our agency and following the herd as it occupies our minds and absolves us of the need to take conscious action in our own lives, something which is a precarious and perennial balancing act. After years of conditioning from a school and employment system that is still predominantly based on the industrial revolution, it is no wonder that it is so difficult for people to live with true intention, despite all the modern conveniences that theoretically allow us to do so. To be able to create an independent, sustainable identity that is strong enough to withstand the buffeting winds of societal expectation and egotistical self-sabotage, to live a life of meaning and integrated truth, to be your own person, not anybody else's, is the ultimate acheivement.
