Lately I have been thinking about what it means to be in prison. For me, I live and work from home via the internet in a big HDB apartment, and the concrete walls surrounding me makes me feel claustrophic. There are times when I wake up and stay within the confinements of our flat for more than 24 hours, and it does get suffocating and punitive.
Then when I take a look at these beautiful animals in Mandai Wildlife Reserve, I find that they have more living spaces than me as a homo sapien. I don't envy them, because like me, they are also confined in manmade, pseudo walls which limit them to only the spaces that they have been allotted.
We are all living in prisons in one way or another. A day might come when I am old enough to die, and I'd be relocated to either a 2-room flat, a nursing home bed, or a hospice bed where I'd be just waiting for my time to come. This body and this mind is the prison which I'm trapped in, and when I'm cremated in the furnace, I disappear together with the body and mind which has confined me. That's all.
Quite complicated, yet also quite simple: Life in my own prison.
