How to not create a prison!

I experienced so clearly the sense of being imprisoned and constricted when I casually accepted the offer from my job some years ago to do a master’s degree.  My employer would, so to speak, pay for it.  I would work for them for three years after completing it.  I had always wanted to do a master’s degree!

I so enjoyed the studying.  I love integrating ideas, choosing just the right word, incorporating the learning and understanding into my daily work.  I always knew that having to pay the piper would cause problems and, boy, did it. I found it excruciating to be locked into a work position for a specified amount of time.  I may well have worked there, unconcerned, for three years, but the fact that it was written in stone, threw my mind into turmoil.

I struggled and wriggled and created much misery for myself (hopefully not others).  There would be moments of seeing clearly, all misery somehow magically vanishing, but then, I would start the whole storm up again.

Slowly, slowly, I saw the relationship between the hook of my desire feeding into a whole host of consequences which I found confining.  The more I wriggled and resisted, the more painful the situation proved.  But, it was not really the situation causing the pain.  It was the way I was choosing to experience it.

And, I, and only I, was the one who had initiated the whole conundrum.  It was such a strong lesson in how to be more conscious in my choices.  How an apparently simple desire can lead one on the road to great distress.  This small writing emerged from that experience.

I construct
With great precision
Domes
That imprison.
Thought, concepts
The ruts of repetition
Form crisscrossing beams
Diminishing space
Compressing my spirit.
I see my work
I abhor it
I struggle
Within its confines
And find
I only create
Further
Confining structures.
I seek freedom
But find myself
Flailing
In a barrage
Of constant
Assembly.
All effort to escape
Compounds
The imprisonment.
In despair
I stop!

-Anand Amido