Going about the calming familiarity of performing mundane tasks this morning, a thought came in sideways.
“Look outside the cage.”
The pointedness of the statement startled me, yet oddly, in a comforting sort of way. What cage am I in, or do I perceive myself to be held by? And in what way am I limiting my own vision by present circumstances that are in flux, and subject to change?
There is a very tricky kind of self-deception that can occur when we allow our range of emotion to dictate the ‘truth’ of a situation, which when looked at from outside the cage, would appear differently. We lose when we place the spin on what lies within the confines of our current conundrum, rather than taking objective inventory of its outer context. Who has the time for that? And yet, the lack of taking the time to see straight costs us much peace.
The struggle to see objectively is everyone’s Achilles heel; after all, with all we do see, we can’t see our own face without a mirror. Perhaps it is ironic that allowing those who are close, trusted, supportive and honest is a necessary step to inner self-awareness; allowing a friend to hold a lantern for us when our hands are too full of our moment to clearly see what is beyond the cage.