On Winds and Freedom.

The winds of change are rising in the world of JJ. I hear the singing in the wires and feel the breath on my face. I know where they’re coming from, but I don’t yet know how strong the blast will be or where it will blow me.

At such times I lose faith in the principle of Taoist equanimity. Instead I get fretful, feeling like a caged animal waiting to be removed to a different zoo. Will it be a better zoo than this one, or will it be worse? And why do I have to be in a zoo at all?

And I lose patience with the self-styled gurus who sit smugly within the pages of their profitable self-help books, telling their rapt readers who want to believe:

You can be whoever you want to be. You can do whatever you want to do and go wherever you want to go.

It doesn’t actually work in practice, does it? Life isn’t designed like that. Try telling it to a caged tiger pacing back and forth in a 12ft square cage until sadness and desperation turns him into a vegetable, and the only instinct he has left is to attack whatever comes within striking distance.

As for we higher minded creatures, the concept of freedom – whether defining it or living it – is actually both complex and subjective, and you could probably argue that nobody but the suicide is ever entirely free.

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Meanwhile, what should I make of the two huge marquees that have appeared in somebody’s garden locally? Why do people spend large sums of money having huge marquees erected in their gardens? I have my suspicions, and I’m growing tired of enforced endings.