An old friend once told me "Everything happens for a reason."

Very cliche statement, heard many times over on the internet, but this man visited me in real life and that was enough for me to take some serious consideration and actually explore the phenomenon.

It was at a transformative time for me, going for my first job after years of reclusiveness. I was the man above all others who would be taking funny interpretations with all my philosophical and theological content stored away in the noggin.

So over time I was observing strong patterns and signs that my intuition was really holding on to and taking to mean something.

On my road to cleaning up, I developed a daily/weekly plan, which I had dramatically named The "Last" Plan, implying a number of things:

• That it would be my last attempt to give myself a rigid routine (I guess it was my first too..)
• That I may not live long enough to make another (I said it was dramatic..)
• That the plan implies that it will help me to last longer. Healthy habits and all.

I followed it well. Some of the things on the plan involved creating art regularly, however I felt it was committing a crime against creative expression to robotically make pieces on a forced schedule rather than according to passions as they arise. This, surpsisingly did not seem to affect the quality of my art, however, and I wondered if my glorification of non-structured, "only do what you feel deeply about" sentiment was an illusion or somehow lacked grounding in the nature of reality.

Fast forward many weeks and rows of tallies I came upon a day in which I was asked to help a friend make a music video in town.

I have been trying to learn humility, so even though I have been feeling very empty and unsociable in this period of my life, I decided to help him. 

The music video involved the actor appearing in various scenes with a box in his head. He also had a little symbol of a snake eating its tail clipped to his shirt.

I had just spent the past few months obsessing over "breaking the cycle" as my old friend told me I could do, and also trying to figure out how to truly be myself as he had also told me I was a persona of myself. So this imagery that my music-video-making friend was now portraying, was strikingly relevant.

I could not help but feel as though my rigid "Last" Plan was the box that I had put on my head. It was the first and only thing that really came to mind.

It was a nice list of habits and tasks that, although I wouldn't necessarily always want to do them, I was comfortable enough to do them. It meant I didn't have to think about doing anything else. It meant I didn't have to listen to my conscience when it told me to walk the dog. 

"I didn't put it on the list, so, I don't have to.." I'd justify to myself.

It was an illusion of practicality, and it was exactly what I had been seething over all the way through my education system. Rigidness for the sake of rigidness.

It was blinkers on a horse. So I did not have to face the world.

So eventually I stopped. I spent on and off periods where I would live entirely according to my mind. No plans. Just learning to listen to intuition. Each moment, what was calling out to me.

This has been incredibly frustrating. My dog can sense it and whenever I enter the room she goes crazy, jumping up at me and barking for a walk. She can tell when my mind is geared and receptive to nature. And my body is incredibly irritable after some terrible periods I have gone through, so it has happened that I have sunk back away from responsibility to my senses into some routines again.

Yoga, Meditation, etc.

So I suppose, what I am presenting here, is that you don't need a box on your head.

It seemed to me like our education system has had a sick hang-up on this box, but as soon as you take it off, you find that moment to moment, you already know what you ought to do, and the man with the most sophisticated plan or routine may not be doing anything that satisfies his soul or that of those around him.