We live with the knowledge we gain from those who teach us. We form our opinions that we “should” and we are given emotions based on events that should stir us. Even books have been handed to us with a label and we label everything as we are told we should. We read what we are told is great without even knowing what great means to us. We deem it literature while unsure of what that word really even means. We are little boxes full of air drifting along the sea searching for an island to spill our air onto, because we think that sharing our air gives us purpose. We are searching for a purpose because we are taught we should have one. And we are little birds that are taught to fly without even knowing we have lived in a cage. The bars around us are protective and comforting and we don’t care to see beyond them. Little animals without knowledge of the wild, yet our instincts yearn for more. We have no clue about instincts though, and so we don’t acknowledge the presence of that yearning in our gut. We are given music and we told it is beautiful, and yet we have no education about what beauty is or really means. The words are just words to us and so we learn them with empty emotions and we live with the empty emotions that we are taught. We decide what is best for us and we think it’s a choice, but it’s really just part of our domestication. We eat what we are told is acceptable and we gasp at the culture shock of watching others eat bugs, or fish, or animals that have yet to be added to our vocabulary. It is too scary. It is un-safe. We add safety to our cage while we drift by using labels like religion, as a crutch for how to live. We give the labels to the beliefs that are taught. And because we are taught what to believe, we use the labels to believe it ourselves. It gives us purpose, and it settles our instincts. We call the other ideas scary, and unsafe. We are too caught up in trying to share our air and fulfill our purpose about what we are taught, to reach and step outside ourselves, and step outside what is “real”. And so we sit in our cage and we drift in our boxes hopeless and lost, without the knowledge of how hopeless and lost we really are.