Prisoner now

We are prisoners, all of us, to reality. We are not able to give full vent to our passions. There are many who would say we can, and yet if we truly could, we would quickly be prisoners in the literal sense, or prisoners to unnecessary poverty, or prisoners of psychopathy, or perfectionism, or some other form of shackling of the soul.

Indeed, the more extreme a person's opinions, the more you shall find that they are a prisoner to their habits, or perspectives, or sudden uncontrollable actions. Living on an even keel instead of burning brightly then, is a praiseworthy thing indeed.

Most things, one could argue, happen on the middle road. There is very little raw material to be accrued, very little to be learned from a permanently extreme existence, except of life in the extremes. 

To live with temperance is to shield oneself from a world that is already extreme in all possible dimensions.