This concept freedom...

I remember I couldn’t wait to get out of there. I wanted to break out of my Bastille and roam a free man unencumbered by the dictums and doctrine of those who confined me. Okay, that was a bit dramatic. I was a youngster dreaming of being out of my parent’s home. I wanted freedom.

I wanted simply the right to “be on my own,” to “be my own man,” to come and go as I pleased and do what I wanted. Man I would kill to be under the care my parents provided for me: “three hots and a cot”, continual and unconditional love, direction, a soft place to fall. Sometimes we mistake our “chains that bind” instead of being what they are: the loving arms restraining us from running into traffic.

As I reflect, I see many of us always seem to look beyond where we are. We seek that nirvana of our “freedom”–the concept of: “there” is better than “here.”

Is it not paradoxical that if we continually focus on something or someplace beyond our current grasp, that the space between actually becomes our jailor? How can we feel free? We become trapped by our longing...

Someday we will get to someplace at some time to receive something from someone somehow. How many people live life in these shackles?

I see so often around me (and at times in my own life) the bondage that people create by the feeling of being trapped: in jobs, in relationships, by their schedules, their finances, their limitations, and their “status”. Is it truly “freedom” we need? Are we bound? By what or whom?

I wanted freedom from a career and received unemployment. I wanted freedom from relationships and received loneliness. I wanted freedom from pain and received intoxication. I wanted freedom from a schedule and received boredom. I wanted freedom from reality and found it wouldn’t leave. Which is more binding?

Now I do indeed realize that people are held beyond their will. I clearly empathize with those whose circumstances were imposed upon them creating insurmountable odds and dire consequences. Many are held in prisons far beyond their deserving and not led there by a jury of their peers. Their flesh mortified and their souls trampled, yet...some...are still...free?!

I offer you this taken as an excerpt from Viktor Frankl's - Man's Search for Meaning:

"We who lived in concentration camps can remember the men who walked through huts comforting others, giving away their last piece of bread. They may have been few in number, but they offer sufficient proof that everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms–to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.”

I see how restraining my chosen perspective on things has been to me in the past. I see how my internal dialogue leveraged my inability to see the true gold from the pyrite. How often do I now humbly desire for one more chance to be confined within the walls of the spaces I wished to break free from. Sometimes only momentarily...

As I see it now, freedom is an odd concept. Like a monkey swinging from vine to vine, he is only truly “free” in the air in the moments between grasping the next vine. If he remains in that space he flails and falls. It is the clinging and swinging that offers progression and security. Perhaps at times we don’t truly desire the freedom of the freefall, but simply need the next new vine. Swing on and be free my friends!