The prisons we choose to live in are closely connected to our experience of limit and frontier. We often remain passively within our inner prisons, because we believe the limitations are fixed and given. It is strange how being caught makes you lose the sense of the outside and the beyond. You become trapped on one side of a wall. After a while you learn to see only what cages you; you begin to forget other views and possibilities. It is the lonely struggle of the prisoner to continue to remember that he belongs to life and not to limitation. Limitation is, of course, real and factual, but it is meant to be temporary. A limit is meant to call you beyond itself towards the next new field of experience. We usually view limitation not as a calling to growth, but as confinement and impossibility. Something begins to change when we can see exactly where the walls of limitation stand in our lives. A strong poem by Cavafy, “Walls,” describes how the walls that lock us in are secretly built. You hear nothing and you notice nothing.
When they were building the walls,
How could I not have noticed?
But I never heard the builders,
Not a sound,
Imperceptibly they closed me off
From the outside world.
Cavafy articulates something that happens to all of us. Your complicity with other people’s images and expectations of you allows them to box you in completely. It takes a long time to recognize how some key people on your life’s journey exercise so much control over your mind, behaviour, and actions. Through the image they project onto you or through the expectations they have of you, they claim you. Most of this is subtle and works in the domain of the implicit and unstated subtext; it is, of course, all the more powerful for not being direct and obvious. When you become conscious of these powerful builders and their work of housing you in, something within you refuses to comply; you begin to send back the building materials. There is no planning permission here, thanks for the kindness! Such projection and expectation is based on their fear and the need to control. Expectation is resentment waiting to happen. In contrast, friendship liberates you.
Real friendship is a powerful presence in helping you to see the prisons within which you live. From inside your own life, it is so difficult to gain enough distance to look back on yourself and see the outer shape of your life. This discernment is often easier for your friend than it would be for you. Real friends will never come with a battering ram to demolish the prison in which they see you. They know that it could be too soon. You are not yet ready to leave. They also know that until you see for yourself how and where you are caught, you cannot become free. If they destroy this prison cell, you will inevitably build a new one from the old material. True friendship attunes itself in care to the rhythm of your soul. In conversation and affection, your friend will only attempt something very modest, namely, to remove one pebble from the wall. When that pencil of light shines in on your darkness, it arouses your longing to become free. It reminds you of the freshness and fragrance of another life that you had learned to forget in your cell. This dot of light empowers you, and then, brick by brick, you will remove the walls you had placed between the light and yourself. True friendship trusts the soul to find the light, to loosen one pebble in the wall and open the way to freedom. Massive inner structures begin to loosen and break when the first pencil-thin beam of recognition hits us.
Often others may judge you to be in a prison, whereas in actual fact you were never more free and creative. True knowing goes beyond projection, impression, and expectation. There is a whole moral question here regarding the nature and timing of disclosure and intervention. If you show someone bluntly that he is caught in a prison, you make him aware of his confinement. If the person is incapable of liberating himself, you have left him with a heavier burden.
