Experience Freedom!

“Freedom. To most, it is an idea. An abstract thought that pertains to control. That’s not freedom. That’s independence. Freedom is riding wild over untamed land with no notion any moment exists beyond the one you are living.”

Elsa Dutton, 1883

Independence is a fact. Either something is controlling you or not. Freedom is different. Freedom is not a fact, it is a feeling. You experience freedom. 

When chains were broken and slaves were freed they became independent. They experienced freedom. 

Freedom is knowing you can go in any direction at any moment. Roam where you choose. Do what you will. 

Freedom is having the wind in your sails with only the horizon ahead of you. Freedom is going off trail. Freedom is spinning the globe, closing your eyes and dropping your finger. If you’re a cowgirl like Elsa, freedom is having a strong horse underneath you and nothing but open plains in every direction. Freedom is the feeling of being free. 

One of the greatest gifts I’ve been given in my life is that feeling. I felt it when I was 18 and 19, hopping around Indonesian islands on small planes and boats. I had a backpack, a pair of headphones, and the wind at my back. I was free. 

I felt it when I was 21 studying abroad in Istanbul. I roamed the city, exploring alleyways and streets, intent on discovering every corner. The friends I met there made me realize I wasn’t alone. There were other people that craved freedom. We explored together. We were free. 

When I was 23, I backpacked southeast Asia for 4 months. I was in a village in Thailand when my friends told me about a boat trip down the Mekong river into Laos. I left the next day. On that boat, I experienced freedom. 

I got married when I was 28. She wanted freedom too. We flew to Iceland, walked through Portugal to Spain, flew to North Africa to central Europe. We wandered wherever we felt like wandering and did whatever we felt like doing. We were free. 

Like Elsa in the show 1883, I chased freedom, but when I found it, I also found its dark side. On each of those adventures I came face to face with the knife’s edge. 

I felt the wind give out under a small island plane over the Pacific Ocean. I felt it drop 40 meters before catching another gust. I felt a speedboat get tossed carelessly by waves on the open ocean between islands. 

I woke up alone in a Lao hospital, sweating with fever. I spent three days watching a fan rotate slowly above me, wondering if I would survive. 

I drove through the empty Moroccan desert with my wife and 4 angry men. 

On each of these trips I came face to face with the heartless terror that freedom is capable of. Freedom doesn’t care about you. You are a leaf in the ocean. Freedom may drown you or it may carry you to shore. It has as much of a preference as a coin that gets flipped.

There have been many times when I was busy basking in the limitless joy of freedom, only to be shocked when the clouds rolled in and the storm began to rage. A life without rules, without restriction, without caution, is playing with fire. You will get burned, the only question is if it will be fatal. 

The desire to experience freedom was the burning passion that drove me in my early adulthood. I could not be distracted. I could not be stopped. I could not be slowed down. I could not be convinced of the danger. I had to experience it. And I did. The pure bliss of its beauty and the terrifying storm of its heartlessness.

What I’ve come to realize during my recovery from the terrifying and heartless side of freedom is that it needs to be balanced. What balances freedom is responsibility. They are opposites on a spectrum. As you take on more responsibility, your freedom naturally decreases. As you increase your freedom, you are able to take on less and less responsibility. 

I have not given up on freedom, but I have experienced enough of it for now. I’m ready to see what responsibility has to offer. I want to experience devotion, and you can only experience devotion by taking responsibility for something. I want to be devoted to my family, my community, my students, my readers, my listeners, and my friends. I want to experience the satisfaction of slow, hard, work paying off. I want to nurture something and see it grow. I’ve had more than my fill of freedom and I’m sick.

I’ve had wings. Now I want roots.

Freedom is a two-sided coin. It may land in your favor or it may land in your destruction, but as much as it has burned me, I still believe that to feel real freedom, to bask in the purity of that moment, when the past and present disappear and all you are is unlimited possibility, that is when you know for certain, that you are alive. The truth is:

No one needs my words. 

They need experiences that give them their own words.

All I can do is encourage them to fearlessly seek out those experiences.

Because that is where real freedom lies.