swimming away aimlessly without thought: a pet fish, seemingly the one pet you can first entrust the care of to a child. low-maintenance, unassuming in their tank, and pleased with the synthetic mediocrity of its environment. food dribbles down from what it assumes is the threshold of it’s being. day and night are defined by the child’s ability to switch on and off a light. no matter how much the fish tries, it is unable to find much of a life out of water.
i sometimes feel like i am that fish.
we all feel like the fish sometimes though. don’t we all hit a point where it feels like we’re simply stuck in a place with an endless expanse caging us? i admire those who have never felt this way. those who haven’t had to flop about on dry land guessing the general direction of which way is to water.
generally this fishtank we find ourselves in is pleasant. the synthetic pieces are obscured by the other fish swimming around and making contact with you. other days such as today, it feels like the cumbersome task of navigating this fish tank is an impossible one. sometimes the other fish will kindly move aside as food falls from the sky, but others will knock you away for their flakes.
our lives are saturated with an endless supply of thoughts; so much so that we have to work hard in order to formulate our own. they are fed to us much like the flakes that fall into the tank. without knowing it, we could be repeating the things we were fed from the great big abyss in the sky. things like an american dream or a legacy that won’t be forgotten. maybe i’m doing that right now? i can’t be completely certain. these words could be my thoughts or they could simply be a rearrangement of some old philosophical texts.
either way, we eat these thoughts up and regurgitate them. some say we will do this endlessly, but the universe doesn’t believe that. like the fish, we will most likely be taken from our tanks, be it a small glass encasement or the expanse of the ocean. at some point we will be eaten by the bigger fish or the things we cannot comprehend that live outside of our tanks.
yet we keep swimming aimlessly.