RATTLE THE CAGE

March 30th, 2020

Everything that drives you is stuck in a cage.  That cage is you.  Every desire, hope, dream, curiosity, ponderance, hypothesis, question and inkling is stuck inside of your mind. 

But they all obey a certain law of hunger, that is: if you feed something it grows.  If you starve something, the hunger eventually dies.

This applies literally and across the board.  Our well-fed modern society is almost universally ignorant of the fact that physical hunger – that is for food – drastically vanishes after a few days of fasting that are undertaken with a basic mineral supplementation. 

This connection between fasting or abstinence and the decline of hunger or desire carries to many other arenas.

Children are naturally quite curious, so what happens to all the adults they become?  The curiosity is starved, and eventually, it goes quiet.

Hunger goes away if you don’t feed it. Notice how many different areas this applies to: Fasting Goals Addiction Curiosity Relationships Learning.

Now think of this in the reverse.  What we feed or don’t feed follows the same pattern of a vicious or virtuous cycle.  What is fed grows and grows the more it’s fed.  We can quite literally see this with obesity or with the extremes of any kind of addiction.  We are prone to notice the negative here.  The extreme examples that are obvious are negative, and the examples of the opposite that are obvious are also likewise negative: curiosity is killed off in most people, and we grow lazy with our learning and relationships.

But we can swap the extreme to the positive, by starving those things in us that don’t serve us (i.e. an addiction) and feeding the good, like curiosity.

A well fed addiction is like a dangerous animal in a flimsy cage.

A well fed curiosity is like an energizer bunny generating power with a running wheel.

One can help you keep the lights on.

The other might destroy you.

This image of the cage is a way of figuring out what is driving you, and what you’d rather have driving you, if you don’t like the answer.

A well fed curiosity or habit of learning will wake you up in the morning and get you going on the things that are actually fulfilling.  But if you’ve got other things rattling your cage, how can you expect that the person you’ll be tomorrow or next week or next year will get up and get going at the things that will make life interesting?

One further point is to realize that all of these things that drive you, for good or bad are all stuck in the same cage together.  Whatever is weak cowers before the strong which uses it’s strength to horde your attention and get fed first, and most, leaving the neglected to die a little more.

Change, involves a difficult and mindful assessment of the situation, and then confronting the fear that some well fed addiction won’t bite you as you push it aside to feed that dying flame of curiosity deep within you.