~Shakespeare, Love's Labours Lost
We are seekers of the light! For guidance, warmth, purpose and direction, we long for the light and are attracted to it. But sometimes, for lack of vision, we cannot see the very thing dividing us from it. Like the poor fly illustrated here, we can get stuck on a window and die there, headed for freedom but never leaving our self-made prison.
This is denial. Like an inivisible wall (or window) separating us from what we seek, we are drawn to the light without seeing what is literally right in front of our faces. We refuse to try another route, get away, go around... exhausting ourselves by ignoring what our pain sensors are telling us. It doesn't work.
Then there is false light, artifical sources of light that throw lightbeams in every direction, confusing those of us who are phototaxic, that is, who are oriented to light, which would be all of us. We become like those poor winged creatures flying in dizzying circles around a lightsource at night. This must be what it is to be insane: doing the same thing over and over and getting nowhere except exhausted on the floor and stepped on in the morning.
Finally, there is the romantic. The one drawn right into the heart of a flame burning brightly in the night, who gets incinerated in its loving gaze. This is a kind of impulse control problem, an addiction, be it to a substance, person or situation. It is suicide by light.
I'm not sure what the cure is, but it seems simple. Probably too simple for our buggy brains. It probably goes something like: seek natural light, open windows and a clear flight path.
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