Life Lube

As you become more experienced at doing life, you become a monkey in a tree who knows where all the vines are.
A lawyer who knows where all the loopholes are.
A doctor who knows what all the smart handles are.
Where experience has taught you the legitimate fast-lane to the martial art of your life, you inhabit.
Well done. You made it. Happy?

But you're also like a prisoner who knows where all the bars are.
A politician who knows where all the fiddles are.
A hospital manager who used to know where his soul was.
(I feel a poem coming on).

You are living a construct.
When you become a specialist - in anything. ..macrame, smoking, hula,  anything - you are a specialist only of that particular artifice.
Ask anybody who knows anything about 'evidence-based anything', and you should already have realised that your artifice is by definition... wrong.

Our realities, the ones we all select, are wrong.
If you need your delusions and want to be kinder to yourself, you can call your realities works in progress.  But unless you are actively working on it, I would just settle for plain wrong. It's a lot clearer position to start from when you are thinking about what you going to do about it.
You are thinking about this, right?

Your construct is something created by man for ease of understanding, ease of flow....life lube.
(It is poorly documented, but women occasionally dabble in this as well, usually related to washing-up techniques, protocol at the Clinique counter, or reading Hello).

As you become more skilled at your chosen game, you find that many of the bars of its cells are not needed to deny escape.
You are a monkey who only needs half the vines to get around perfectly well. In fact better than perfectly well. Better than most.
Many of the rules of your game can be dispensed with.
But of course this cannot be taught. It has to be felt. By persons with a reasonable IQ or emotional intelligence and good character. It cannot be rolled out to a group of whoever wants to turn up today.
Doubt this? Ask anybody who's ever run any business.
Ever.
And do me a favour, don't get back to me.

It's everywhere.
Watch an elderly person walk and you'll note the minimalist movements. The best balance of safety and speed for the cranial occupant.
Watch a 16-year-old girl walk, and you'll see uncertainty in the step. Even after 15 years of practice.
Watch her 10 years later (a high-definition camera from the bushes I often find gives good results), and her step can betray arrogance, or denote elegance. (That poem's getting a bit closer).

Do you still think we don't read minds? Our 6th to 10th senses are always working.
There is a lot of everything in people and you can tell a lot about people when you take a little look at a bit of their everything. (That's the advantage of high-definition).
Somebody gliding into your personal space can either appear intimidating or beautiful depending on the other ways in which they present themselves. Goths don't come over too well on these occasions, for example. Skinheads aren't much better.
This is the way life works.

The next thing that happens is somebody takes a few bars of your matrix away. It may take weeks, it may take decades. If it takes decades, you're screwed. You probably forgot how to learn years ago. Claim ageism. If you're black, racism. If you're female, sexism, if you have spots, spotism. And if you're scared of spiders, get a note from your doctor. Because you have just become redundant.

Maybe there's been a new law, a tightening of an old one, a making of a new one. Instantly your expertise became redundant. The bars are in different places. The vines were deciduous. You're a hunted animal, soon to be a scavenger. And you used to be so much more. You were the fella who knew what the matrix looked like, you knew where the bars were, where the lines were drawn.  You were it.
Well, you better get fluid, Poindexter, because they ain't there no more. And you never saw it coming, you clown. Maybe you could find a role in a part of the world that still has those nice old bars that you recognised so well. Or maybe you should just grow up.

When those bars of your oh-so-familiar matrix are taken away, you don't know how to swing home. Quickly nor slowly. You don't know the way.
You don't even know the damn way.
You see ghosts of the old way, shadows of the old bars covered in slime and shame. Maybe you persist in trying to make them real again. Paint the slime.
Or perhaps if you have any reason left and you can allow yourself, you just realise. The game's up.

But you have an alternative to all this inevitability ...... you can step outside your matrix and see it for what it is.

And the great thing is, you can do it from day one. You can still be its master. There is a difference between mastering 48 kB of Manic Miner on the ZX Spectrum, and 2 GB and 26 three-dimensional levels of Quake and Doom on the PlayStation 3. But human capacity did not change over this decade or two, just the challenges it gave itself. (Plus a little bit of evolution, as it seems to me there are an awful lot more zombies around than there were in the 80s).

Imagine a cube with bars of lead piping. Occasionally the bars you know so well shimmer and disappear. You might choose to visualise this in a provocative or entertaining way. Before you know it you might be enjoying change. (But don't tell the NLP gurus that I'm giving this away for free).
I'm sure it's great to play chess for a lifetime, but if someone introduces you to a new game, then come on, get with the program. Give it a crack. At least recognise it as an interesting challenge.
Because your matrix doesn't live in a wooden box at the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark, it lives in an alien world in a minimum of four dimensions. That you thought it might only be three, at best was stupidity, at worst wishful thinking.

So what have you decided?
Are you going to stick to your original matrix?
Or move onto my ethereal matrix?

I'll give you 24 hours to answer.

Good luck.