uncaged

An animal caged might pace the floor, or sit in one place rocking back and forth. It might sleep all day or bang its head or bite itself, drawing blood.

Why is it doing this?

This behavior — stereotypic behavior, it’s called — is a natural reaction to an unnatural situation. The cage is to blame. The enclosure at the zoo or the bare walls of a research laboratory, after all, are a poor substitute for the dry deciduous forest a rhesus macaque or white-breasted mesite might call home.

And so the macaque rocks back and forth, back and forth, back and forth. It hunches in a corner and rocks back and forth and tugs at its ears. The mesite grooms itself with single-minded obsession. It digs its beak deeper and deeper, pulling out its feathers in bloody clumps.

You see the same behavior in people, too. Prisoners cut themselves, swallow sharp objects, bang their heads against the wall. Old folks with dementia in nursing homes pinch, scratch, hit, bite, and burn themselves, punch objects, pull their hair. Institutionalized mentally ill patients bite themselves, press their eyeballs, and bang their heads against hard surfaces.

In a cage, self-destruction becomes your only means of self-determination. Or, to put it another way: If you can’t get out of your cage, you might go out of your mind.

Struggling uphill along a breakdown lane on the verge of tears, pummeled by fumes carried on a hot headwind, feeling like I’m biking through dirty bathwater, the only thought on my mind is: Why am I doing this?

Because for all the suffering in this moment, at least I’m not in a cage.

The adventure life puts you face-to-face with fear, pain, hunger, and exhaustion. And until you’ve confronted their absence, you’ll never appreciate the most ordinary things — food, water, rest, safety. It makes you realize that maybe they’re not ordinary after all. Just ask any one of my students.

One of the central tenants of Buddhism is this idea that life is suffering. To an American, that might seem frightening or nihilistic. But to a macaque, its heart pounding, fleeing up a tree to escape a crocodile? I think it might tell you that suffering is the point. Only through the lens of suffering can you can see your life for what it is: a precious and fragile thing you must fight to protect.

And if your life isn’t worth fighting for, what’s it worth at all?