Bondage does wonders for some souls. 

What crushes most sets some onto a trajectory of transcendence.

Those who dig deep into their purpose find a way in almost any bitter, caged circumstance. The form of entrapment can vary. To a hated job. To a dull routine. To a joyless marriage. To a career that worked in the past but is dead now. To a life-sucking ideology. To meager prospects. 

Just as great ideas push to the fore in turbulent times, great spirits can shake themselves into being under severe restraints.

Take prison. 

Malcolm X formed himself/his vision there. 

Martin Luther King renewed himself in a Birmingham, Alabama jail. 

Miguel de Cervantes conceived of Don Quijote, the first modern novel, while in prison. 

Gandhi first read Thoreau’s Civil Disobedience in a South African jail, helping him flesh out his philosophy of nonviolence, one that would ultimately prove successful in his quest to peacefully oppose the British in India. 

Constraint demands acquiescence or inspiration. 

Nelson Mandela refined himself into a great and graceful leader, reconciling racial hatreds in South Africa despite 27 years of imprisonment, including a number of years spent in cruel hard labor. 

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, in the gulag and in exile in Siberia, scratched out books that would inform the 20th century of the horrors of the Soviet penal system — and of speaking one’s mind in a totalitarian society. 

Those who crawl above circumstance change lives, their own and others.

. . . . . . . . . . . 
Note: My apologies to those who dove into this post thinking it about a different kind of bondage, the fun kind.

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