Bound by Desire

Doesn't it sometimes seem that the things we buy confine us?

The newest of cars still needs regular maintenance, and often repairs. 

Clothes need laundering, organization, hangers, ... 

Electronics need time for us to set up and read the manual, plus regularly update.

Books need time to read, games time to play. Subscriptions time to enjoy. 

Everything we buy or subscribe to binds us in a way to commit to using / sustaining it.

More insidious than this kind of bondage is that to our own creative force.

Our own ideas hold us hostage.

We get a creative idea. We commit to acting on it. Then we become bound to our own creations. My father worked his life for a small company, becoming beholden to its success, and forced to work to the end of his life to maintain what he started. Even my fun software project started as a great idea, then became an addiction to fix, maintain, and enhance.

Our knowledge is also confining. If people know you are good at something, they expect you to help them with it, be it math homework or fixing a house or a car. More than that, the more you learn, the narrower the areas you are expected to seek employment in.

These are not necessarily bad things, but the something in me rebels against the thought. I want to enjoy life as it is, in the here and now. Instead, I am spending more and more of my time catering to different thoughts and ideas I have. Even writing these very words in my blog. I had to allocate time and energy for it - time and energy that could have been spent playing with my daughter.

The rat race is not imposed on us, but begins when we choose to jump on the bandwagon - chasing our own thoughts. 

Zhuangzi said, you can't run away from your own shadow, but you can't catch it either. So much of life is spent in futile activities.

I wonder if God, provided it exists, is also enslaved to its own creation, i.e., to us. There is no other explanation for why he or she kept sending us prophets and missives, at great effort, when we were such a lost cause, and even - presuming Christianity is true - sending their own son to save us. Our having a life of our own, and freedom of choice, limited the Deity's freedom.