Free

 

“Where ever you go, there you are."  Jon Kabat-Zinn

What makes you feel free? When I think of the word free, descriptions like vast, spacious, boundless, untethered, and open come to mind.  The opposite of free conjures words like constricted, constrained, stuck, not aligned, imbalanced, landlocked and controlled.  When we experience a longing to feel free when we are young, we are often looking to feel free to be, do or act in a particular way.   As we grow older we often feel free differently and are looking to be free from something, whether it is a responsibility or circumstance.

Spending a week in a seaside town a short distance from home, I relished seeing and feeling the many aspects of the ocean. The sea breeze at night while I slept, the salt on my skin after a swim, and the icy cold of the Atlantic that invigorates every aspect of my being from a plunge or a lingering swim. When I sit and stare out at the vastness, I truly feel a sense of being free. The ocean seems to whisper about possibilities and opportunities of the unknown from its shores. It would be meaningless for me to argue with justifications of restraints and reasons this may not be true. As the waves lap the shore and invite in the grains of sand, I can witness the emptiness of those unspoken words. I too know I am as free as my next, thought, action, or wish.  As I stay a little longer, I witness with compassion the parts of me that have tightened against the unknown and I release a little. I am free to look to the horizon without knowing what is just in front of me and this feels like freedom.

This same little seaside town is also becoming known for the large population of deer that roam freely about. Every morning we see them waking in the yard of our cottage and every evening grazing on grass and plants nearby.  The spotted fawns are plentiful right now and are still close to their moms while branching out periodically to test their freedom with more space and distance around them.  These gentle creatures are everywhere. The beauty of these majestic beings and the freedom and grace with which they move throughout their days, cannot be debated regardless of how the town may be feeling about their presence. 

I have been off from my job since the beginning of summer but going on vacation where you leave behind your home,  your environment, your circumstance, and the triggers that go along with these things, have me thinking about being free and what it really means. Free by definition means to not be under the control or in the power of another or able to act or be done as one wishes. It is times like vacation when we have free moments, days, or weeks, that being free becomes so meaningful. The difficulty in noticing this kind of freedom may be in understanding how often we do not feel truly free in our lives. If we ask ourselves when was the last time we actually were able to act or do as we wished, I wonder what would come up for most?   I think many of us would have to be honest with ourselves about how much we have interfered with our own opportunities to feel free in any of life's circumstances. Even when given the wide open space of the ocean, the release of other's expectations, or the duty of care and responsibilities in jobs and family for many of us, we would still have the constraints, boundaries, and blocks we create in our minds that inhibit our ability to feel free.

Looking back at the various phases of our lives, we may tell ourselves stories that right now is not the time because of x,y,z or that being free will come with more financial security, time, vacations, and when our children grow up, or when we are retired. These times often arrive all too swiftly and then we have other reasons we are constricted. Now we believe we are too old for that, too tired, or convince ourselves that there is something else always in the way of what we are wishing to do in whatever way we choose to rationalize or defend.   What if all of these stories are just ways of protecting ourselves from a different longing?  A way not to be disappointed by the reality of the experience. What if we have forgotten the real allure of being free?   We seem to take our constraints, real or imagined into every new situation without realizing we are even free to challenge while also being gentle with ourselves.  Being free gives us room to slow down, let go, forgive, and serve. When we experience freedom from our limiting beliefs, freedom from our inner critic,  from the stories told to us, and by ourselves, there is more aliveness there. 

I recently finished reading the book, Midnight Library by  Matt Haig,   where the woman was able to visit an endless variety of lives that she may have lived as they all existed based on one different choice she had made.   The current life she had been living was one she was feeling choiceless in and not free   She had attempted to take her life and was now given this opportunity to choose one of the lives she visited to stay in.   This common narrative of many books where they show you other options and then you end up choosing the one where you began, is very familiar but the one difference with this one, is that by choosing the one she was in, she was also choosing the unknown over the known.  She was choosing to be free to experience whatever should arrive in the life she chose and being reminded that it was indeed the life of her choosing, she felt free. 

Maybe this is how we can experience freedom in our lives regardless of vacations or vastness or spaciousness of time. Perhaps it is in witnessing the ways we become our own prisoners of our thoughts, how we disempower ourselves by being locked into the barriers that are self-created, and how we withhold compassion from ourselves for our missteps and misguided inner dialogues.   If we can realize that what we want for ourselves is really what is best for everyone else as well and resolve to make the choices that are ours to make. I will leave you with the words of a wellness coach I listened to recently, " Find what it is you want to do and do a version of it even on your busiest day because you are allowed to close the door on non-negotiables for yourself."  And this sounds like being free to me.