This may sound a bit weird, but these thoughts have been going around my head for while now, so best I write them down so I can decide if it is truly sense-making of my life, or just random drivel from a mid life man’s mind. So here we go…
You know when you’re a kid and someone will say “what is your favourite animal?” Mine was always the wolf, no question. The wolf was my beast. Yes it’s scary on a primal level but there is a savage beauty to this creation of Allah which is inspiring which I just never found in other creatures to the same degree.
I mean, I really wanted to be like the wolf from an early age. Cunning, brave, savage, capable of being cruel where necessary but never out of liking of that cruelty to other things.
But also lean, hungry, looking for that next opportunity, being mobile in my thoughts and my life pattern and even as a lucid dreamer, from about the age of ten as I learned greater control over my dreaming mind, where threatened I could if I chose to turn into some kind of wolf thing and rip any threat to pieces.
That was going to be me, that is who I wanted to be as grew into manhood, I learned to fight, I was brutal on the rugby field even if not the biggest out there, I wanted this so much in my life, my relationships, my career, so how did I end up acting and looking like a bear at 43 years old?
I am frankly mostly sedentary in my lifestyle, overweight, no obese technically though still quite active as I walk a lot… Yes I walk a lot… I don’t run, I am not fit and active as I was playing rugby as a child and young adult, I walk and walk and ponder and ponder and life just passes me by like a giant river. Occasionally I put my paw in the water and scoop out an easy to catch fish, but the vitality is gone.
All my habits, my love of food, ease and comfort has led me here to this point, where every act reinforces the next and builds on the last, as I plod through life, not so much aimlessly but certainly not how I feel I was meant to be.
Everything around me, my work, my life, my family, my community, modern easy living, it’s all forcing me down the route of the bear. That has become my pattern, as I keep doing the same things everyone now expects of me, I keep feeding the bear who is getting fatter and fatter.
Yes I can growl a bit, but the savage, lean, hungry side that I felt when young is nearly gone. Really I am just a fat old bear, living comfortably, raising a few cubs and in the depths of the night when I can’t sleep I ask where did the wolf in me go?
I feel him there in the back of the cave of my mind, starved telling me to get up and run, to work out, to strive and fight for every scrap with all the strength of my whole being but my life habits are baked in, so I do little bits here and there but this is still just feeding the bear.
I feel I have two tracks I feel I can be on, two sets of habits, two modes of being, one that I have lived for the past twenty odd years, easy going, mellow, slow to anger and slow to move or strive. The other quick and hungry, meaner and with less f’s given to the sensibilities of those around me if it gets in the way of doing what I need to do to be the absolute best beast if a man I can be with the time my Lord gives me on this earth.
So I need to stop feeding the bear.
Every habit, every thought, every scrap code reinforcing my behaviour I need to question, is this feeding the bear or the wolf in me?
We are creatures of habit, every one of us, we allow these habits to rule us, to ruin us if we let them. So every time I let an argument go, I don’t fight and take the easy route, I don’t strive, I take a day without hitting the books, or the weights, or going for a jog, or even a run, or not listening to something inciteful on a podcast, I am feeding the bear.
I can hear a low growl of the wolf now, at the back of my mind’s cave, he is getting up, stretching, pacing back and forth. There is hunger there, a darkness that is in there, a part of me which I’ve suppressed for so long I had almost forgotten. A different side longing to escape, the part of me which ran as a child and dreamed beautiful savage dreams wanting to build new habits, reinforce a new mode of living.
But first I gotta stop feeding the bear.
GINGERBEARDMAN 