I recently came across this story.
“A man was imprisoned for years in China. One day in the shop where he worked in the prison, his eye caught little bits of bright wire amidst the shavings on the floor. He began gathering them and saving them in a bottle in his room to brighten things up a bit in his cell.
After years of confinement, he was finally release from prison and brought the bottle full of wires with him to remind him of his years there. Now an old man and unable to work, he spent days waking at the exact hour the warden had decreed the prisoners should awaken and going to sleep at the usual prison lights-out time. He paced back and forth in his rooms in the same patterns he had while confined to his cell, four steps forward and four steps back. After some time of this, he grew frustrated one day and smashed the bottle. He found the mass of rusted wires stuck together in the shape of a bottle.”
Bette Bao Lord, Legacies: A Chinese Mosaic
Has your life got stuck in the shape of it’s bottle?
