Where the Wild Things are

As a kid, I really enjoyed the book 'Where the Wild Things are.' I wasn't really ever sur why I enjoyed it, but I liked the idea of some little kid going off to play with a bunch of monsters and coming back home. However, as a sort of strange side effect, I also disliked the book because it was too simple (haha, precocious and arrogant even as a kindergartener ... I think).

In my later years, however, I have grown to understand the reasons why such a book touches the core of us. Fundamentally, it is about escapism from a world we feel doesn't understand us, and returning only after our own inner needs of self-expression have been satisfied. Within this rational discourse is the very powerful (and very prevalent) emotion that is at the core of all human beings. We dislike having binders and chains put on us, and we long for a world where we can escape and be wild and most importantly, true to who we are deep inside.

Yet, the ending of the book displays the boy returning back home, just as we cannot always be wild. Though we humans are emotional beings at heart, the advances we have made as a species and as a collective consciousness stems not from how we feel, but how well we can control those feelings. It doesn't matter if we are angry, or sad, or happy, but it fundamentally matters where those emotions drive us to go and what to act. Being wild is useless empirically, while being wild when it is necessary is productive.

I realize the rather uncomfortable realization that is implied by my statement; if 'being wild' is at essence the expression of who we are deep inside ourselves, our unconscious being or baseline behavior, then I have essentially advocated self-suppression in nearly all cases (assuming, of course, that in nearly all cases are true behavior isn't really that useful). However, careful thinking reveals that we already do it to such a high degree. We censor speech when appropriate, we alter our behaviors depending on our context, we create psychological refuges for which we can roam and be wild. What harm would it be to take it just a few steps further and completely transform our existence into one ruled by our surroundings? Perhaps it would make us as a race more efficient and push our productivity and innovation to levels unheard of, now unhampered by our feelings, by our emotions, and most importantly, by ourselves.

It's the 'by ourselves' that makes it an uncomfortable to pill to swallow. Should we as a race lose our identities for the same of everyone? Is this really that beneficial (the ant, termite, and bee would say 'certainly so')? And most importantly, is identity really something worth as much value as we believe it to be?

I, like all others, do not have answers to this question. But I do know this; the joy of being wild, for me, is mitigated by the realization I must return to my cage. In that sense, I can no more partake of the joy of self-expression than I could of a last meal before an untimely death.

Sobering thought, isn't it.

Today is sunny and warm, but it is raining in some part of the world, so I am lazy.

Cheers.