This is a post that is surprisingly not about nature

Ah, freedom. What is freedom? It’s often said to be an inside job. At least, that’s what the typical self-help counseling and healing perspective will tell you. Probably, that’s correct.

But I’m less interested in that being the case and more so in why that is the case.

And why is that? Well, if there’s one thing — value, aspiration, quality, whatever you want to call it — that’s always been an obsession of mine, it’s freedom. The idea of it, its reality, its nature. This may simply go hand-in-hand with being So American (™), or it could just be a fixation for this particular lifetime. Either way, this personal focus is not detached from that of the collective. We all know that “freedom” is a central value to the good old US of A. Where perspectives differ, though, is around what “freedom” actually means.

At this point, I don’t think most of us fully understand freedom. In fact, I am not so sure I fully understand it myself. Even with it being such a super important personal value, here I am struggling to define it. Is it a tangible value? Nothing more than an ideal? Does it even exist in nature?

Thus “The nature of freedom” is a very intentional title. (More so than usual, I guess??) The idea that freedom itself has its own nature is sort of … it’s limiting, isn’t it? To think that there is one single way to be free, that’s it, end of story, and if you don’t find it, that’s it, you’re done, so sorry, no refunds.

Maybe that’s part of the key to accessing freedom. That it requires facing this paradox to find it.

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I recently finished reading Liberation Day by George Saunders, and while that wasn’t the initial prompt for writing this, I’m confident it had a major influence. (There’s no helping it. Every single time I read a story of his, I’m done. Obliterated. A highly recommended experience, 10/10.)

The title story in the collection is definitely relevant to this subject. Granted, it has so many beautiful (tragic) complicating factors, all very relevant to the way we have to live in this capitalistic scope of things. And in the end, it prompts more than a few questions about what it actually means to be liberated.

Most importantly: what happens when you see a truth that would hypothetically set you free — but do not (or even cannot) listen to it in your external reality? (This is really the most I can say without ruining the whole thing. Just go read it, okay?)

That’s a question I don’t know how to answer. But it’s one that matters, especially in this ~brave new world~ of everyone’s eyes on everyone by way of the Internet, and of economic realities making it difficult to divorce oneself from corporate life. How does one, as Camus put it, make oneself so utterly free that their mere existence is an act of rebellion?

Saunders actually hit upon it succinctly and eloquently in a great interview with Orion magazine’s Sumanth Prabaker:

I don’t know that I’ve ever felt truly liberated but I’ve had brief glimpses of what that might mean during meditation practice – a quick falling away of my usual yapping monkey-mind, and so on. (But then it came right back, as I went, “Oh, wow, that was it, that is so cool, I can’t wait to write about this!”) There can be some feeling of freedom while writing too – when suddenly “I” am not really there, thinking about me, but all of my energy is being used to try to figure out how to make the story better – I’m fully in it and reacting to it and using some stockpile of truth and imagination to make it more beautiful, by instinct.

And there have been times that I’ve realized intensely how not liberated I am: for example, when I’ve lost someone dear to me and feel all of that pain and realize that all those times that I felt happy and confident and in-control were just a trick of circumstance, not a triumph of character.

So that’s one take on liberation from within. That is: from pain, from darker emotions, from the self as a whole.

And then? What about after that? What do you do with that, if anything? Or where do you go to keep finding it? Because it’s true, as he puts it, that it’s not possible to stay in that place for every moment forevermore. 

That’s another one I don’t know how to answer. But it’s worth asking.

I believe this question matters because so many seem to think that inner freedom is only valid if outer circumstances reflect it. But lately I’ve started to question this, and attempt to dismantle it, since I’m not sure it’s the most helpful of beliefs.

It started few years ago, when I did the whole Workaway thing. And noticed a pattern wherein my fellow volunteers, young women within 10 years’ age difference from me, wanted to be free, to live freely, to be unattached from the typical working world — and, God, I respect and admire that. Seek it, even. But they didn’t have the means financially to support themselves beyond the spaces they found themselves in. Which is, you know, not a huge deal for a little while. But does that undermine the pursuit of freedom? It sort of seemed to, at least to me, based on the brief time we spent together. But in other ways they seemed more free than I did in spite of my transient noncommittal ways.

Working for someone else, in a similar vein, does not necessarily give you freedom as many people tend to picture it. But then, the financial ability to make certain life changes and decisions — that’s something that typically comes with that situation. A freedom of a specific kind.

Multilevel marketing companies, in contrast, promote financial freedom as a value and an aspiration but, as most of us know, end up putting people in the opposite situation. A web of a sinister, sudden kind.

What about working for yourself? (Okay, I know, why this insistence on using the lens of work? There’s a reason, I promise.) In that situation, you are still somewhat limited by others’ wants and needs. Which is not a bad thing per se. But even if your schedule is your own, there are restraints.

Work is where most of us spend our days. It is certainly questionable whether this is healthy or helpful to our development as people, but it’s the way things are, so it’s a natural decoder. Because work is this cultural hinge point, it’s natural to want to use it as a vessel to seek something valuable. But if it can’t provide that something, then you have to find it another way.

So if your mindset says you have to do things a certain way — whether it’s living at a work-stay or working for a big company — then are you really free?

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In light of this, the idea of ultimate freedom seems aspirational. Maybe that’s all it can be, just like democracy in its purest form — an ever-unfolding experiment, a hope. Something to keep working toward while understanding something can always push back on it. Maybe a deeper sense of freedom starts with knowing you can always find your way back to its general direction, and get closer than the last time you sought to make it there.

If you think of it that way, you might also note that freedom can’t exist without some kind of restraint. Another interesting paradox.

I think this concept gets missed in recent talks and discussions and arguments about what limits freedom and curtails it and sets it up to be destroyed. Perhaps this cannot be avoided at this point in the history of the US. Perhaps that is part of the specter of being a former colony — that is, to always be haunted by the spectre of authoritarianism, to know you have to constantly fight it.

One book that touches upon this concept well is Your Money or Your Life, which I’d recommend even if you’re not interested in the FIRE movement. (I’m neither advocate nor naysayer, for what it’s worth. Just an info hound.) That’s because it speaks to this thing called ownership so well. Taking ownership is central to freedom, and I don’t know that that gets talked about enough. To really be free, there is at least this key requirement: being responsible for that desire and accountable for yourself in pursuing it. 

And what lies behind that? This idea of free will. Whose existence is highly debated, of course, and yet there’s something about becoming more conscious with everything you do that (in my mind, anyway) puts it within reach.

I doubt anyone has ever summarized that more clearly than Portia Nelson in “Autobiography in Five Chapters,” so I’m going to go ahead and link the poem here. (It’s the one about walking down the street and falling into a hole, until you don’t anymore.)

What is the point of that poem? Essentially, it’s what Jung said about making the unconscious conscious. That, until you do, “it will direct your life and you will call it fate.”

I am wondering lately if freedom is as simple as this. Meaning, finding it within yourself to see — and to not get stuck somewhere internally. To admit that you’ve been unable to see before. And then, only after that, finding the ability to choose differently.

Isn’t that the heart of that Saunders quote, in the end? That liberation isn’t about anything “out there” — and not anything “in here,” either. It’s about being able to release the chokehold on what you think is your self, and act in a way that actually serves yourself and those around you well. Regardless of whether it aligns with any should or must.

I think that idea gets one last “I don’t know,” because no, I don’t know for sure. But none of this is about knowing or arriving, is it? It’s about staying on the road that gets you even a little bit closer to where you’re meant to be.

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