Just imagine that you’re bored, you haven’t been getting any initiatives for quite a while, and you feel as though your life lacks excitement. Afterwards you discuss it with a friend and you get an earth shattering idea: You’ll build a labyrinth with all the possible fine tuning so as not to make it dull. There’s a little something for everyone: action, darkness, horror, chaos, temptation, provocation, challenge, seduction, distortion… Word about your labyrinth spreads around. On the opening day people are already queuing up in front of the cash desk. Everybody wants to try it out, everybody is just crazy about getting lost, not knowing where he is, getting really scared and pretending as though they are frightened. Your labyrinth has flourished into a huge amusement park. And it’s the same every day, the same queues lining up in front of the entrance. New levels of difficulty are constantly being built in so that those who have already experienced it-once again have got something new and unexpected to go through. But, all of sudden, it starts to get unbearable for some. They might have overestimated their capabilities. They’ve chosen a level of difficulty too high for themselves or wanted to get the biggest kick right away. They’ve been lost for several days. They’re stuck and no one is on the way to help them. And why should they? It’s just a game, what could possibly go wrong? On the insides and outsides of the labyrinth you can see different scenarios taking place. While families and friends are forming search parties or are getting ready to storm the labyrinth, others are still waiting in line to experience it. The people in charge are trying to lure the lost ones out of hiding, but they’re not reacting because they’re scared and don’t trust anyone anymore. What to do? Rebuild the haunted house into a pleasant room where only soothing sounds can be heard and where every nook and cranny has got plenty of light? What about those on the outside, who bought tickets in advance or maybe even, got them on the black market? Sometimes I compare our lives to a labyrinth. But the most significant difference between a labyrinth in an amusement park is that we don’t know how we got into it. We don’t remember going through an entrance or paying admission fees. We often think that we don’t have a clear goal in our life. Contrary to a maze we actually don’t know where we are going – there doesn’t seem to be any real exit or an end to it. We sometimes don’t realize anymore that we find ourselves in this complexity of countless ways and dead ends. And while we are in them, every now and then we run straight against a wall or get distracted by numerous “attractions” which we encounter along the way. A hall of mirrors that reveals us in the most obnoxious of deformations, grins and poses which every once in a while scare us, making us tremble. We are prone to identifying ourselves with what we see at the moment, instead of taking a few steps back with a smiling face and detaching ourselves from the intentionally distorted images and returning to our own true nature. When we are already caught in this labyrinth we can see it as a challenge, a training course, an adventure or a game. Be it a very nice and well constructed maze we can still lose our courage for a short time, we can still give up, we can still doubt and not know which way is up and down or left and right. We regret the moment we set foot into this labyrinth, we curse the moment when we got the idea to engage in this complicated and entangled adventure. Were we not ashamed and scared of being laughed at by our family and friends we would long ago have yelled: “Please, get me out of here!” or “I can’t find the exit, can you please show me the way?” or “it’s too dark, I’m scared, can someone please turn on the light” or “I’m so alone and lost, I’m scared and don’t know anything anymore – please help me, don’t leave me alone…” or “I’ve had enough of this so called fun, I don’t want to do this anymore, I’ve had enough, please show me how to get out of here…” and … if we aren’t currently located in a super modern, state of the art and computerised compound, where just a single press of a button on a specially designed wristband will suffice to connect us with the command centre in order to open the door, if we think that we have no one to rely on but ourselves during the whole course of the maze – not to forget that this is naturally a part of the game – we have no way of knowing whether our cries of despair will be heard, if they’ll find their way to some opened ears. The question that presents itself is, how desperate do we have to get, how much of our strength and nerves do we have to lose, how many times do we have to take the same way or run around in circles before we are ready to cry for help or to just stand still to look around and think if the exit is truly that which we are searching for or if our concepts of its appearance and shape aren’t exactly that which is preventing us from seeing it even though it’s right in front of our nose. Maybe it will suffice if we just take off a special type of glasses from our eyes in order to see that it’s all just unreal, a virtual world, a game in which we’ve gotten so entangled, a type of hologram that can vanish by the press of a button. Maybe…. But, whatever…. We can look at life as a
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