apt

"I'm deaf, dumb and blind," cried Saul Bellow "the slave of unknown masters."

It seems Mr. Bellow might have been portraying himself as a victim when he spoke these words but I see no need to affix such a label.

The sentence speaks for all of us some of the time and for some of us all of the time.

I'm deaf, dumb and blind, the slave of unknown masters.

We do not end up with a life that we would have designed for ourselves if given the opportunity. We do not end up being what we think we want to be. We do not go down a path because we have chosen it. We are all slaves to unknown masters inside of us, doing as these masters please and living as a response to their commands.

All of this is certainly true, how else can you explain the crazy things that people do.

Most people will be in slavery for all of their life, a few will come to terms with it, most will find eternal frustration with it and some will realize that it doesn't have to be that way. The later will trudge down the difficult road of personal development, some to find freedom and some to find more frustration.

All the self improvement literature instructs us to determine our purpose, to set our goals, to pursue our dreams. Where the literature fails is that it doesn't tell us to find our place first, to look at our base, to determine where we are starting from.

What is it inside that makes us buy something we don't really need, makes us eat something that isn't any good for us, makes us skip our exercise and makes us susceptible to all sorts of things that are of no help at all?

Perhaps we should spend as much time identifying our unknown masters as we spend in determining our purpose and our goals. Making plans for improvement may just be futile if we do not make plans for freedom.