How Free Are We?

Yesterday, despite my strong dislike, I visited a zoo with some family members so the kids could see animals they’d otherwise only know from books.

As someone who loves animals and nature with a passion, and who believes that all living creatures have an equal right to exist and live in harmony with their natural dispositions, since we all stem from the same source, the same root, the same substance, the same star dust, I truly despise zoos.

Seeing birds that should be soaring freely through the sky or migrating from one end of the world to the other each year, locked behind bars in cages, makes me question my humanity.

Watching the hippopotamus, normally master of the river and unafraid even of crocodiles, lying motionless in a cell barely three or four times its size makes me wonder how, as humans, we dare do this to a fellow living being.

I look at the lion -the master of the forest- eyeing the chunk of meat thrown in front of it, staring emptily at people pushing selfie sticks closer and trying to pose with it. I picture that same lion chasing prey in the wild, protecting its cubs, or fighting another lion.

I can’t help but wonder if a lion born and raised here still longs for those experiences somewhere in its heart.

Walking through the zoo feels, to me, no different than visiting a prison where all the inmates are innocent but locked up. We leave quickly, both troubled by the sight of these creatures imprisoned through no fault of their own and exhausted by watching the people who actually seem to enjoy it.

This leads me to reflect on our own lives. Do we live our lives any differently than those caged animals?

I can’t help thinking that a person who’s never truly been free, who has never stepped outside society’s predetermined lines, who hasn’t questioned what they really want beyond school, work, career concerns, obligations, attachments, and possessions, who is forever chasing money to acquire more and more, defining themselves through ownership, identities and attachments is at the core, not so different from these animals in cages.

Finding our true identity, questioning what we really want in life, discovering our real potential and limits, these are things most people never even dare to do, or never even feel the need to do, lost as they are in the hustle of career and the demands life thrusts upon them.

It’s saddening to realize how many people go their entire lives without sincerely asking or answering questions like “Who am I?” “Where am I?” “Where do I truly want to be, and why?”

Here’s hoping we live in greater harmony with these questions and their answers.