I’ve been thinking a lot about this… these thoughts are my own opinions, based on life experience and the lives of those who share with me… I am not a psychologist, just someone who has reflected…
The Cage…
We all live our daily lives, not always taking notice of why we do the things we do, or how we do them. Life has programmed us to act and react to situations. The cage is where we live, how we live, without thought, without taking notice. The cage leaves us with little or no choices. We just do it that way… unthinking, without question. For example, I never walk backwards or take the same path to return. When I hike, I’ll follow the path up the mountain, but somehow, I refuse to take the same path down. Yet, if the path is a loop, I’ll follow it all the way back. Strange when I stop and think about. I also try to never jump backwards… in my plyometric workouts for example… The good in that is that I tend to always want to be moving forward in my life. Yet, I miss the opportunity to look back, to rethink my steps, to learn from my mistakes. The bars on my cage are the ones that take away the choice of reviewing and rethinking…
The Box…
When I started taking notice of those bars, when I started questioning my course of actions, when I began looking at trying to change a few things… that’s when my cage became a box… a box implies a way out, there are no bars. Yet, a box is still a container that keeps us within our usual rituals. I can go hiking now, climb the mountain and start making the decision to go back down the same way. It sounds so silly, really, but at the end of the day, taking notice helps me make different decisions.
The Freedom…
My sense of freedom came when I started making my own decisions, not because of rituals or un-noticed fears, but out of a sense of power. I can choose to climb up one way, go down the same way or decide to take another way down. Now that I understand where those fears stemmed from, I can look at every aspect of my life and….
Change my cage into a box by taking notice of why I do things, then, get out of the box by making different decisions for myself…
Life is just one big puzzle… Amaze yourself every day!