Tuesday 18th March

Life is a trap, or rather a series of traps.  You realise you are in a trap, somehow you escape and in no time at all you are in another trap.  We are born into a trap of our parents making, even though they weren’t aware themselves of building it, even if they were prescient enough to realise that it was a trap.  Hahaha….  We grow up knowing nothing, absorbing everything we see around us, learning eventually that it is a trap.  Sometimes this is too late.  Some of us never have the strength to escape the parental trap, living ‘happily’ in the comfortable trap of their parent’s lives until another trap-door opens and they slip into their own married trap, but as it may be very similar to the one they just left they may not notice the bolts on the windows and doors.

Education is now almost entirely devoted to making us except the trap, to want it, to fashion our own locks even.  And some traps can be very comfortable.  Life outside the trap may appear too dangerous to ever venture outside.  We are trapped in the system, unless we want to be a tramp, homeless, a vagrant.  Or in those rare cases when enough wealth may be created to escape and live a different life, or what may pass for it.

And the biggest trap is our feeble minds and bodies.  Who can truly escape the bonds of the body, with its needs and ailments?  Who can faithfully dismiss all the memories of earlier traps to free your mind and live a trap-free life?  And do we really want to?  Think of all the billionaires, they all get married, they all have kids, despite the freedom all that money could buy.  But maybe freedom becomes another trap also.

Sorry if this blog sounds depressing.  I realised as a child that life was a trap, or to be more precise that I was in one.  As I escaped for a few years I failed to see the hair trigger snap as the trap shut time and again.  And even now, comfortable, I know too that it is a trap.  As living on my own would undoubtedly be too.  Self-awareness doesn’t bring true enlightenment, or if it does you realise you can do little about it, except exchange one trap for another.  Keep smiling….