Summary: A motivational story using pictures based on facts about animals and people.
A buzzard can be effectively pinned within a 6 by 8 foot cage, even with the top wide open. Though it could readily fly out, the bird habitually prefers a 10 foot take off space. Lacking that, it will make no attempt to fly.
The bat is the most acrobatic of mammals with its dexterity in the air. If you place a bat on the flat ground, however, it cannot fly. It needs an elevated perch for take off, and lacking that can only amble along using its wings as legs.
A bumblebee can be completely undone by a simple jar. Put the bumblebee in such confines and it will ignore the open top above and seek an exit through the sides, continually, until it collapses from starvation and dies.
Most of humanity is akin to the buzzard, bat, and bumblebee. Enmeshed in our immediate situation, we persist in habit, seeking something to prop us up, or looking in the same places for a solution when the solution is not to be found immediately around us. How to escape the trap? Look up.
Consider your highest ideals and goals, what you value the most, and focus your mind and care on that. Such a view is difficult at first. We tend to dwell on our past failures, wrongs that have been done to us, personal humiliations. We might lament that we keep getting stuck in the same situation, and yet something within us colludes to keep us there, winding in a circle that never ends.
Instead, fix your eyes upwards, on where you want to be, think of what you love. Do what you love, never what you hate. With such a fixed vision, which takes discipline to maintain at first, the worries and sorrows slowly slip off like unneeded chains and weights. Then we can fly.