First, forgive me for this post. I don’t know if it’s the effect of the Superbowl, the onslaught of random ads, or just a brief failure of self-regulation. But consider yourself warned that this post is less than savory due to frequent references to feces – monkey poo in particular.
I frequently post on themes like anxiety and systemic dynamics in which anxiety ends up driving people to behavior that undermines often both logic and love.
When I think of anxiety wrecking havoc, I don’t always think of systemic dynamics. Sometimes it’s just people turning loose their anxiety and/or dysfunction on people in primal and reactive ways.
It makes me think of the monkey cages at the zoo. It’s been documented that some monkeys enjoy throwing their feces at others. I don’t know why. I’ve heard things like it’s about establishing superiority or it’s an expression of reactivity against strangers. Someone else can speak to that. But it is essentially a reactive and hostile expression of a survival instinct in some form.
Sometimes I feel like I’m doing life and I felt like I’m stuck in a monkey cage while monkeys are flinging poo. Since seeing this graphic above, I’ve started to visualize this graphic in specific moments. Now I’m only posting this now because there’s no concrete example in recent history and I can offer a general reflection.
We are so often anxious beings. And while we aren’t working on survival in a real Darwinism type of way, we do operate out of a survival instinct sometimes when anxiety surpasses a certain threshold and then it’s like dysfunction takes over and other people get the brunt of our stuff.
So maybe it’s defensiveness, maybe it’s unwarranted anger, maybe it’s rigidity of thought, maybe it’s being on the wrong end of a major victim or martyr complex, and maybe it’s being judged not because of concrete reasons but because of people’s own insecurities and issues.
Those moments are like taking a stroll through the monkey cages when there’s a big poo fight in the works. They can be experienced in just about any place you can have contact with a human being.
Poo flinging is not just anger. Poo flinging is most often done with a smile on the face. It’s unloading all of your junk on someone else in often creative ways and thinking you are right for it.
Sometimes I feel like maturity is really just like wearing a big rubber suit in the monkey cage where all the poo can bounce off of us and we don’t retaliate by throwing poo in return. Sometimes I feel like wisdom is avoiding the monkey cage as best we can – though it’s not possible if not for any other reason, we sometimes act like monkeys as much as anyone else.
Life is lived in the monkey cage though and we’re all in it. Let’s keep the poo flinging to a minimum and not retaliate. Maturity is important – spiritual and emotional and even social. Let’s keep learning and allowing ourselves to be transformed by God’s grace.
This metaphor has become such a large part of my internal dialogue, I felt like it needed to be shared at some point. Superbowl Sunday is as good of a day as any 
This work, unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.
