History is the nightmare from which I am trying to awake.
(James Joyce)
Freedom. I don’t believe that freedom is everlasting. It is a moment, an evanescent feeling, an urging desire. I wonder if we are ever totally free. We are bound to the work that we do, bound to our old and new families, bound to our society, and most of all, to our inner conflicts.
We are given moments of freedom in all this meaningless routine. We want to climb that damn mountain, but we forget to look around and inside us. We wait for special days for an escape, and we, as human beings, are unable to work outside this history – personal and social.
I wish I were a Dedalus today, fleeing away from everything. Daring to tell my friends how I really feel. Daring to fly from here, daring to quit everything that I have done so far, and start all over again. Daring to fucking breathe.
I am yearning for freedom now: from today, from here, from myself.
What makes you be skeptical of the idea of everlasting freedom?
ReplyDeleteWhat would a free human being would look like to you?
You make an interesting point in the last sentence. You want freedom from yourself. Yet, to me all the other things you mentioned are also smaller parts of « yourself ».
Even the routine you talk about is not problematic in and of itself - it’s the meaning you can’t find in it. This is something easily solved since there’s no meaning at all, in anything. We give and establish meaning. You have the freedom to choose between meaning and lack of meaning.
That’s an interesting question … I feel free in my travels (which are not many), climbing a mountain, wandering in a new city, or reading a good book in a nice park. We cannot travel all the time, find the right people (that's quite a complicated job), live without caring…. I tend to care too much for others and too little for myself, and I am a little bit of a workaholic. In the last weeks, however, I started wondering if this is really worth it. When I wrote these lines, I was thinking beyond the social freedom … I was thinking of the simple human being, who has to make some decisions and give up some things for others. And maybe the definition of freedom changes over time and/or with our emotions ….
DeleteWhy do you feel free while doing certain activities and chained while doing others? Is there a fundamental, immanent diference in the different activities themselves? Or, maybe, the difference is in something that solely depends on you?
DeleteI know that you were thinking beyond social freedom - that’s what I aim to discuss with you. Is there Freedom, as an absolute, that can reside in the human mind regardless of circumstances? Can we call « freedom » something that is, as you say, nothing but a feeling/emotion, something that has a different meaning depending on time or the person that experiences it? I’m curious about your thought on this.
And, on a different note, can the feeling of freedom be irrefutable proof that someone is indeed Free?
Why/how do you care too much for others? Why do you care too little for yourself? Would you like to change these things?
When I wrote those lines, I was having in mind Michael Cunningham’s lines from The Hours regarding happiness. So yes, maybe as happiness, the feeling of freedom is influenced by our state of mind. Also, when I wrote this post, I was feeling the need of quitting, of taking a break from my job. I normally love what I do, but for personal reasons, I felt that then, and it was/is impossible for me to do that. We may have choices – leaving our country, finding another job, saying our point of view – but I think we are somehow constraint of inner or/and social norms.
DeleteYour way of thinking reminds me of a friend that I had in high-school. Do I know you from somewhere?
These are the lines of Cunningham. My mind replaced happiness. “We throw our parties; we abandon our families to live alone in Canada; we struggle to write books that do not change the world, despite our gifts and our unstinting efforts, our most extravagant hopes. We live our lives, do whatever we do, and then we sleep. It's as simple and ordinary as that. A few jump out windows, or drown themselves, or take pills; more die by accident; and most of us are slowly devoured by some disease, or, if we're very fortunate, by time itself. There's just this for consolation: an hour here or there when our lives seem, against all odds and expectations, to burst open and give us everything we've ever imagined, though everyone but children (and perhaps even they) know these hours will inevitably be followed by others, far darker and more difficult. Still, we cherish the city, the morning; we hope, more than anything, for more. Heaven only knows why we love it so...”
All feelings are a direct result of our thinking, of our interpretation of the outside events. Which is why the same situation will be lived differently by human beings. We have all noticed that many times. So everyone is free to interprete the world in a way that will make them happy - the everlasting kind.
ReplyDeleteWhen we can’t choose the outside events of our life, we can choose how we think about it, how we interpret it. The probability of having enough money to live only in situations that we want to is very low for most people. And, again, even so, there’s no guarantee that we will be happy - we might be satisfied, less stressed, but not necessarily happy.
Regarding norms - inner norms belong to us, they don’t enslave us, while social norms constraint us because we allow them to since we adhered to them at some point in our lives. If they truly prevent us from being happy (not feeling happy, there’s a difference between feeling and being something), then it is still in our power to change/remove them - we stop adhering to them.
Cunnigham’s words are, up to some point, liberating, because they show life as it is - ever changing, ever beautiful, ever purposeless. ‘It is as simple and ordinary as that’. Maybe we stress too much about our goals as if they were absolute. All the ‘bad’ cannot make us, human beings, give up. We love to live, to be alive. This is a fact that deserves our energy and our attention.
We do know each other from high school, and I like to think that we were friends.