Monkeys in a cage

We, Homo sapiens, are like monkeys born in a cage....At the beginning of our journey; we are full of innocent wonder. Too dumbstruck by the strange goings-on inside the cage, we feel utterly incongruous in the stifling environment. We refuse to talk to our fellow inmates, who appear to have found a reason for their existence in the cage while we are still wondering. Aboard the chariots of curiosity, we wander afar; hitting the rewind button on hazy records of lives lived yonder, smelling the faint, evaporating aroma of truth. Thus, in serious musing, we pass our days, while adults try to distract us with their silly attention grabbing tactics. They make stupid faces, funny noises and pull and pat our little body parts. Yet we persist, staring at the ceiling, trying to remember the W’s of existence, figuring out why we feel something’s amiss. But slowly we get sucked into the world around us. The lust for lost meaning loses steam as we give in to the biological need to imitate. So, we do and feel and experience what has been done and felt and experienced by the overarching majority of our kinds for millennia. We turn our inherent curiosity to things, objects, mundanities of the worst kinds, insulting our own intelligence irreparably in the process. Like kids on a beach, we build castles of sand and adorn them with our ambitions, dreams and emotions. Whenever, a strong wind blows away parts of the castle, we go about rebuilding it. The inevitability of waves drowning away our little castles never deters us. We are like veteran actors, so used to being on stage that we forget who we really are. We are so lost off the stage that we prefer spending our lives in other roles, complete with costumes and makeup. In fact, we start believing the script that we wrote for ourselves is the reality. Entire lives are lived, wars waged, empires built and destroyed, without so much as a solitary moment spared to look inside. To look at the reflections staring back from the walls of our inner sanctum sanctora – a palace of mirrors, whose key we have lost somewhere. So we ignore the truth for stories, relinquish the thrill of the unexplored forest for the comfortable cage. Running after droplets of rain, leaving untouched the sea inside.