A friend recently congratulated me on my “absolute liberty,” as he put it.
“You should try it,” I said glibly. “It’s scary, but it’s fun.”
He said that he was working on it.
Then I felt like a jerk, because really, who am I to act as if I’m the free one and he’s not? As a result of his full-time job, my friend can go into any restaurant and order what he wants. I, on the other hand, cannot do that.
My friend can spend the entire weekend in bed if he feels like it. I could, but only if I want to be up all night the rest of the week, making up for lost time on projects I promised to finish.
He can go on a two-week vacation and completely forget about work the entire time.
I can’t even imagine.
—
My dad used to say that most people prefer slavery over freedom, because it’s safer. I think that’s true, but the funny thing is that hardly anyone I know is really a slave, even if they operate like one. The truth is, any of us can get up and walk out of our jobs, without fear of lawful retribution. Any of us can quit a relationship or begin to change the one we have. Any of us can pull ourselves off the couch and out into the park or the library or the workshop, to change our way of life.
None of us are slaves to anything outside ourselves.
But it’s easier to be mediocre, comfortable, and safe, if we say that we have to.
—
I have to get out of bed pretty early, if I want to get done all the things I want to get done. So I sleep with the shutters open, so the sunlight will wake me up. Am I a slave to the sunlight? No, I use the sunlight to help me do what I want to do.
Maybe the sunlight’s a slave to me.
What I am a slave to is my own contrariness. I’ve learned that if I set myself a deadline, I will ignore it, because I will never penalize myself. I can’t excuse this as a condition of being “free-spirited” — that works in movies, in the character of those manic pixie dream girls that everyone happily cleans up after.
In real life, anything we do — even being free-spirited–takes work. (At least as much work as the stylists have in getting the MPDG’s hair to fall just right across her forehead in Every. Single. Shot.) Sometimes I don’t feel like being free-spirited; sometimes I just want a desk to sit at for eight hours, where I can sneak in games of solitaire and shopping on eBay in between earning my regular paycheck.
That’s a choice I could freely make. Some people do.
In fact, I’m going to go ahead and say that making a choice is, in fact, the essence of freedom. (Don’t worry, classicists–I’m not claiming to be the first to say this.) Doing something not from a sense of “This is what I have to do,” but doing it out of a choice. And if it’s not a choice you want to make, choosing to either do something else, or choosing to keep doing it, but for a better reason than the one that’s worn out on you.
The fact of being free is that we’re always doing what we want.
The problem is that some of us are doing things, day in and day out, that we’d be embarrassed to claim as being what we want.
Flickr photo by Kokosnoot
