Whose freedom am I protecting so desperately?
Outside the cloistered world of private practices such as ’sittling’ (sitting in/with stillness), journaling and strolling in solitude I tends to feel about to be engulfed and hemmed in by the demands, errands and duties of social existence. Outside its airtight little bubble—in an effort to make a living I gets caught up, much like a fly in a spider’s web, in interpersonal strings attached, unavoidably. I constantly seeks to fend off binding communal duties and obligations to offer phony terms of endearment. But then, this I that struggles so desperately for its precarious sense of peace & freedom is but an idea that needs constant maintenance too, and even though it’s merely an idea (that is entertained to keep the ’me’ feel real & separate) it’s, in effect, quite a costly one, in that it takes tremendous internal tension and lots of gut-wrenching & constipating melancholy to maintain. Which stands to reason, of course, given that outside its (buffering) practices the I as such would cease to exist. Now, imagine how devastating would that be? The prospect of no more suffering. It’s just too much to take, I guess.
At any rate, I still tries to reason its way out of its irrational ways and so it occasionally reminds itself that: No matter the type of reality tunnel one happens to inhabit it too will have its ups and downs, its inherent opportunity cost. The idea of protecting one’s freedom is totally nonsensical in this respect. Inside the insides of one’s sprawling rabbit hole there will be joys and there will be sorrows and the desire to protect one’s privacy and delicate freedom just as much as in any other rabbit hole out there. It’s all the same from an ego’s point of view. We all play the same human game. All the tension over the mental noise echoing and reverberating off the walls of our private holes, however, is completely redundant and meaningless.
The very effort to protect anything is what creates the reason for that thing to exist in the first place—it only exists in the effort but not beyond it.