On Freedom and Discipline
“I have a friend who used to be reliably unreliable. If he called and said he was coming over to visit on Tuesday at eight, the one thing you could be sure of was that he wouldn’t be there then. Just as every decision consciously completed brings will, every decision neglected costs will. Little by little one’s life seems to be controlled by a negative chaos - a chaos of disorder, accident, sickness, debt, failure, missed opportunities, and so forth. To all of this one might assign the word freedom. In one sense, he was the freest person I knew; he went wherever the wind blew. From another point of view he was a slave to impulse. He once asked me, “What can you do with will that you can’t do without it?” At the moment, standing next to his painted VW bus, I had no answer for him. What can you do with will that you can’t do without it?
A day later the answer came simple and clear: Be free.”
I recently found this anecdote in a book I was reading and it resonated strongly with me, because although I understand this to be true, it is a much overlooked truth for the sake of ‘freedom’ (yolo). I think most of us either know this person, or are this person. This person seems, at first glance, to be incredibly free, yet once you get to the person behind the mask, you realise how un-free they often are. Sometimes they are enslaved by their impulse, sometimes by their past, often they’re just trying very hard to run away from something. And usually that something is themselves. Whatever the reason, sooner or later, it means trouble. Neglected duties and unprocessed thoughts and feelings will pile up and become a heavier and heavier invisible burden, or just one more thing to be running away from. Like a dandelion seed being carried away by the wind, never to land. It sees a whole lot, but it never gets to go through the evolution and growth that it needs in order to become the fully grown blooming flower that it carries inside.
If we really want to live life - live life and not run away from it - we must stop this Peter Pan-ery. It may not sound like fun (truth be told it often isn’t fun at all), but there is no greater satisfaction than to be master of oneself. To be able to choose how you want to act, instead of react. To be able to create who we are, and not just let our surroundings do that for us.
In this series of little posts we’ll go into small ways to take control of your own freedom.