The scene is:

• 430am
• A fresh bowl of Strawberry Cough
• Headset
• This meditation

I have reached the peak of my wake and bake and am on the toboggan ride down. As I proof this over and over, I am quickly realizing that this meditation may have taken a nonsensical path…but maybe there’s a nugget of goodness in there for you to find. You’re welcome to skip straight to the point, The Irony is where it all comes together…I think.

As I watched the jellyfish swirl with their artificial current, I wondered if they longed for the open ocean. Did they yearn for bigger distances to travel? Did they even know what they were missing?

After a moment longer I thought of their predators, which I figured would be dolphins; did they realize that they were trapped in a large cylinder, but also completely safe? Maybe it didn’t matter. Maybe their biology doesn’t give them the choice to be anything more than instinctual, making their trapped position irrelevant. They churn, constantly on guard.

Then again, maybe there was more to consider. As I watched them swirling in the same pattern, I was saddened that they were completely unaware that there is a larger ocean out there to explore. Yes, it has its risks, it’s scary as fuck, and you could be swallowed by the abyss, but what about the call to their true nature? They must feel the pull, right? Then again, the cylinder was their world, they were none the wiser. Unlike the Garden of Eden, a serpent hadn’t come along just yet to serve up the knowledge that something more existed.

Life goes through every phase in their cylinder, repeating everything through each generation. They live their lives carried by a current that someone else made, none the wiser that if the power goes out, they won’t survive, and there’s nothing they can do about it. Yet the current has been moving for so long, it’s seems a guarantee. Had they been human they would’ve been able to dream and find their way to the ocean.

Then What?

But what if they had found their way to the ocean? Would they have jumped in, only to want to get back out? Would their weightlessness feel so different that they would want to go back to the safety of the cylinder? Or maybe they would spend a little time and quickly decide they need to find another cylinder where it would be safe and they can do the same thing over and over and over, knowing that at least when they die, they’d have been safe all those years.

The Irony

Humans believe that they are 100% safer than all other living things. For the most part, that’s true, but not because of evolution, it’s because we are living in our own cylinders, coasting on artificial currents made by governments, religion, and society. We are trapped, and just like the jellyfish, we don’t even know it.