a regulated life

This morning I dreamt I was living "on Her Majesty's Pleasure", ie I was in gaol. It was an odd kind of gaol, men and women, no bars, cages or panopticon, just a suburban bush setting, and trips in mini-buses. But it was a gaol never the less. I had to be there, I wasn't earning a wage, I had to participate in the group - looking after small animals, doing some bush regeneration.

I woke up and thought vaguely "that's pretty much like my life now". I do things because they've been set up that way - go to work, do my job and interact with people there, come home, eat, sleep, pay bills with the money I've earnt at work, walk the dog, on Saturdays go and do the photocopying for church, on Sundays go to church. Nothing is very surprising. Nothing much is happening. My relationships with people seem to have stalled . . .

How do I make things happen? or, How do things happen?

I've just finished reading Haurki Murakami's "The Wind-up Bird Chronicle" - it starts out with a man looking for his lost cat, and it goes on from there. One thing happens after another. The book seems to be about life and fate, trying to take action while you are bound up by circumstance. It also touches on the power one person can have over another, or many others. And methods for avoiding that power, trying to side-step, slip out from, a grasp.