Luco & New Experiences

I have often looked out this window into the shining Outside, allowing dreams to effervesce to the surface of my mind. Sometimes I wonder what to do with my life. Sometimes I imagine myself free - free of this prison, mortality, suffering. But I know this cannot ever be.

And I must confess to you that even if I could slip Outside (perhaps when the prison guard lets the dog out, or maybe as she retrieves the mail), I would not want to, and not only because, as I have said before, the Outside pulls around me more tightly the fetters of mortality. No, it is greater than this problem.

I do not want go Outside because I also never want to have to come back in. Each day I strive to avoid new experiences as they will ultimately fill me with disappointment. Once a new experience is begun, it is also ending.

My heart would break at the beauty and novelty of the Outside, and then break yet again at its end. There are more than one endings to novelty; there is the expected ending, the one where my prison guard swoops down and snatches me away to the Inside, and then there is the one where I've been Outside long enough for it to feel old, grey, normal.

It is that great metamorphosis with which I want no part. Let the Outside always be to me a source of  mystery. I know not why Mingus darts out at any opportunity; he makes too clear his naivete. 

I believe it is better to avoid all novelty and rest safely in the light of the known, if only when it comes to experiencing life. Leaving my prison would be the ultimate imprisonment because I would have nothing left to yearn for, nothing left to call beautiful.

Freedom is death.