The Pacing Panther in the Shabby Cage

 It’s not your fault that you were born into a system that your biology did not evolve to accept: the stress, the isolation, the fear that seizes your solar plexus as you see time gallop swiftly away and your feeling you do not have enough time to do all you must do. The rage that ricochets within you – resembling those clips you've seen of the inner workings of the atom, with protons and electrons whizzing and colliding - a rage that surges in you most as you work a job that offends you on multiple fronts. 

You understand that your job, in some way direct or indirect, is furthering the assault on the planet.  You feel humiliated to know you are so much greater and more vast than the idiotic assembly of actions your job encompasses.  And finally, you sense that the entire notion of working to “get ahead” - as the US President constantly puts it - is mad.  Get ahead of whom or what? Your fellow earthlings?  Your friends?

Yourself? The present? The natural world and its perfectly calibrated cycles?  It seems the proposal of a moron or a criminal.

You are the pacing panther in the shabby cage, but with the added insult of having to hear that the cage is not there - and that, therefore, your stress, isolation, fear, and rage are the result of an illness you must harbor.  They are not. They constitute the life force extant within you -  the trajectory of 3.5 billion years of life and of what Arthur Schopenhauer termed “the will to live.”