How Many Will Make It Past the Prison Walls and Never Get Locked in Again?

Prisons We Choose to Live Inside

Thoughts, conversations, experiences, memories, things that I’m reading are all coming together and leading me on.

For Tolstoy, the self is not a system, but an aggregate. It is a cluster of habits and memories, which incorporate and “excorporate” elements of the random in an endless succession describable by no overarching designs. Wholeness is a project, an effort of will that is never fully successful, because, as Prince Andrei notes, the world will not leave one in peace. The accidents of the self interact with the accidents of the world and together permit no pattern to fix. —Gary Saul Morson, Hidden in Plain View: Narrative and Creative Potentials in “War and Peace”

No overarching designs? Perhaps, but I do see faint pattern marks and wide tracks that curve to end up back at the beginning, where they will then continue along the same line. I see learned behaviors and defense mechanisms acquired in childhood that continue to hold people captive and leave them incapable of truly overcoming.

Why can’t anyone be honest with himself? I know it’s painful, and I’ve done more than my fair share of avoiding suffering, but the Band-Aid needs to be ripped off, the wound needs air to dry and heal.

Don’t recite the rules and paste the labels. Truth is more than facts. Your technicalities and carefully chosen words, your explanations and loopholes: they are distractions and detours that will never lead to the right destination.