Freedom and Fear
Are we slowly becoming imprisoned within our own minds?
Life and death are close companions. Where life goes death will follow; for one to live others must die. The billowing, primordial darkness that drives ever towards death takes many shapes. As one dark shape looms up to challenge us and we overcome it, another will quickly take its place. It follows us where we go and attacks us in whatever space we occupy.
Death follows us from the terrains of forests, savannahs, oceans, and deserts in the form of inhospitable climates and malevolent or predatory beasts, into our nations in the form of war and strife. From the terrains of our nations, it follows us into our cities in the form of plagues and other contagions. From the terrain of our cities, it follows us into our homes in the forms of lifestyle disease. We combat death at every turn.
The violence of nature is fought with walls, the violence of war is fought with tenuous alliances and peace treaties, contagious disease is fought with sanitation and medicine, lifestyle disease is fought with exercise and diet. More and more our bodies seem to us like burdens rather than assets, burdens that hurt when we fall and get sick and fat when we fail to attend to them.
We live our lives now mostly in our minds and as ever, death follows life where life goes. In the isolation of thought and excessive introspection strange things grow; violent impulses rebel against self-imprisonment, resentment grows of self and other, and unnatural desires whisper to us from the darkness of the unknown. Our minds shatter like broken glass and thoughts run rampant; we know no peace or stillness. Intimations of our own destruction and of the world’s destruction haunt us, until we in the eventual madness are made to desire exactly this. We are helpless against our own destructive impulses. The darkness has taken another form and wears now a different cloak. Death finds us even in our own minds.
We are safer this way, perhaps, but our desire to roam far and wide, to explore uncharted territories, and take on new challenges remains what it has always been. Curiosity is one of the things that makes us what we are. Our violent impulses are no more gone than is our desire to roam free, nor are our longings for companionship, community, and closeness.
There is a reason why we grow sick when we stop moving. We are safer this way, perhaps, but horrifying and horrible though the billowing, primordial darkness of death is it was never something we could escape. Death comes to us all sooner or later, and though we feel we may have forestalled that billowing darkness, though our mortal lives are now longer, are they more than what they were?
Our sad hearts in their cages of bone beat rhythms of fear and anxiety even as we sit safely within the confines of our walls; heavy, frantic, desperate as we fill our veins with the waste of our excesses. Few are those exemplary souls who die peacefully at a time of their own choosing, whether from old age or on the battlefield of life and few they have always been.
Of course, we must fight for our places in this world, but it was never safety we wanted, it was freedom, and that still rings true. We are creatures of fire locked away in dungeons of ice, it is for us to decide whether we are ready to face what awaits us outside the walls of our captivity.
