You may be familiar with this.

At work, the screen saver of my computer is this 3-D simulation of a maze that the viewer must endlessly travel through. The viewer continues to stumble blindly into dead end passages and has to turn around constantly. Also, anyone watching would get flipped around inside the maze itself so that it becomes hard to tell which way was up or down.

It is a clever metaphor for life.

Even when the viewer gets to the end of one maze, more walls grow all around, creating yet another. The traveler treks blindly through, almost seeming to feel its way through the corridors of brick and stone.

Like me, the traveler continues to search.

The metaphor of life being akin to a maze is, of course, nothing new. It just needs to occur to us as creatures of a spiritual nature that long, endless corridors and twisted paths constantly cross our lives. They are choices, and each one seems to either free us, or keep us confined as prisoners within.

The ultimate question, then, is, do we choose to continue searching blindly, or do we just bust through the walls altogether, flinging ourselves into a deeper unknown? This discovery also seems connected to the maze metaphor; it’s like discovering a hidden room or a less-traveled path. It’s exciting, invigorating, instantly bringing new hope for an escape.

Maybe a treasure will be discovered hiding in a damp and ill-lit corner of the hidden room. Or a weapon to help cleave through the walls; something to break its endless patterns.

In the computerized program of the maze, however, nothing can be found. It is set on autopilot, and the viewer is pulled along with dulled senses. There is no notion of a goal, nor is there any sense of a vision. The weary traveler just ends the quest only to start over again – perhaps forever.