Find your HOWL

For this blog, we were asked to read this article: http://changethis.com/manifesto/show/51.01.YourHowl

This article struck a lot of chords with me, and I found myself relating to a lot of what was said.

In the Jonathon Flaum's "Find Your Howl" he recaps a story that he encountered when he was a child. The story was written by a fifth grade boy who went to school with him. It tells of a tiger who is trapped in a cage, and wants desperately to escape. The tiger carefully plots his exile, and one night attempts to implement his plans. To the tiger's dismay, he wakes up in another cage. He leapt out of one and straight into another. This process goes on and on and on. The story ends with a hopeless message: the tiger will never escape.

This story is obviously more than just a sad tale about a caged tiger. It is a story about life, and the way we cage in our minds. No matter how many times the tiger uprooted itself and change his external situation, he found himself continually trapped by bars. Leaping and leaping and never finding any sort of freedom. This story is a lesson to everyone. Every single person you can find has created some type of cage for themselves to live in. This cages are made out of a lot of different things, and no two people have bars that are made of exactly the same materials. These "brain cages" or "life cages", or even "freedom inhibitors" are made out of fears, insecurities, regrets, doubts, hopelessness, etc. These bars follow us wherever we go, because no matter how external we can pretend our problems are, ultimately it is a matter of the state of the brain. The story seems hopeless, but really is not. It is just tiresome. The lesson in the story is that we can escape situations, change our lives around again and again. But ultimately, it is a lost cause until we force ourselves to understand ourselves. We have to dig and dig and not try to come up with a quick solution. We have to shed fears slowly and let go. We have to identifying our neuroses and really live through them in order to free ourselves of them.