The wooly bear caterpillar lives in the artic north and it emerges in the very short warm months north of the artic circle. Once it's alive it immediately begins consuming what little vegetation it can find but because of the very short spring and summer, it can't get enough energy or nutrition to to build a cocoon and turn into a moth.
When the winter arrives it crawls under ground and freezes. Its skin, its cells, and its blood freezes. It stops breathing and even its heart stops beating. After spending months in this state of simulated death, the summer slowly arrives, it reanimates, and the cycle starts all over.
This cycle continues on an average of 7 years and often for over a decade until finally, one summer, it forms a cocoon and emerges as a moth and afterwards it has only 48 hours to find a mate and, when successful, it dies.
The wooly caterpillar is trapped in its environment. No one knows how it got there but it doesn't have wings to escape until it turns into a moth, and then it spends its short life left looking for a mate.
This could be translated to so many people who spend most of their lives working towards retirement in a job they don't like. They repeat a yearly cycle for an entire career, never having the mentality, or the willingness, to break out of the vicious circle, repeating a single year for decades, to finally retire, if possible.
My father, in 1960, before I was born, got a job with the Memphis fire department, and as I became of age, he often repeated to me, "I never intended to be a fireman and I expected it would be temporary until I found something better", but 30 years later, he retired a fireman.
Many people make a claim that we simply have to take what life gives us, but as in the case of my father, it might be a way of rationalizing falling into a job by chance, and never changing.
We, however, have "wings" in the form of a mind. We can escape whatever lifestyle we feel trapped in if we are determined to do so.
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