In Search of the Ultimate Freedom

I am a long-time journaler, talking to myself with pen in hand, and chronicling my thinking over time within the written word. I am very much aware that my writing is one way I compensate for a weakness I seem to have with memory.

MY MANA‘O ~ ~ ~ If you are new to MWAC, Sunday Mālama is when we mix it up here. I may offer an extreme tangent to our current value of the month (for April: Mellow Maintenance Mālama), or write about something completely different. My very first Sunday Mālama was this one: A Beginning and this click gives you the full index to page through. I call Sunday Mālama my mana‘o meaning that it shares a deeper view of my thoughts, beliefs, and convictions with you, my Ho‘ohana Community. Thus, Sunday Mālama is also an invitation to share your mana‘o if you wish to.

That said, I don’t look back at my past journaling very much, in fact I can be very nonchalant about shredding old volumes of my morning pages without an ounce of regret;

...when I'm done with something I have written, I am truly done with it. There is this feeling of completeness that happens when the jaws of my shredder become part of the process. The writing has been terrific: It did what it was supposed to do for me. And yes, I loved it... I write, and I am in love with writing, because writing helps me think, reason, and decide. It helps me make sense of things, and bring them to more clarity. Once I do, I can get on with life and move on to the next thing I’d like to think about, reason through, and decide upon or even better, create...

I write to capture things, but only until I can use them in some way. I do write in frustration or anger sometimes, allowing myself the peaceful okay-ness of being an imperfect human being, and that is when I love my shredder most, for those are certainly words that I don’t want left around for anyone else to see. I don’t want to see them again either, for they are just emotion spilling to make room inside for better thoughts, and my shredder helps me remember that there is a whole lot more in life that deserves my attention instead.

From Talking Story, February 2008:
You know you love writing when you don’t have to keep it.

The journaling itself is a process, and I find I don’t need the documentation for very much after the fact at all. One reason may be that a lot of my self-reflective writing has to do with goal-setting, and if I am truly working on those goals much will change (if I’m not, I don’t need the written reminder to help beat me up over it). Hopefully I’ll grow, making my earlier journal entries irrelevant and outdated; hopefully I will get a clean page in front of me, ready to write a new chapter.

There is one goal I know I need not look up in retrospect, for it is very vivid in what limited memory I do have; it has been somehow associated with my goals from as far back as I can remember. At this point in my life, I am quite positive I have written this word in my journals hundreds of times.

The word is freedom.

I cannot recall when or why freedom first became such an obsession for me, however I am quite sure that at the time it would have been a rather small word. When I was younger, I could not possibly have known how hugely the quest for freedom would manifest itself in my life. I could not possibly have known that my quest for freedom wouldn’t even begin until I had logged a significant amount of years in a search for it first, a search for how I would ultimately define it.

Looking back, it was surely a case of ignorance being bliss. I have never known oppression, and I have never had my most basic freedoms taken away from me; I have always been a citizen of a “free country.” I’ve never been in jail, in quarantine, or even in detention of any kind (airport wandering due to flight delays don’t count.) When I compare my good fortune with the circumstance of many in the rest of the world, the freedoms I have searched for seem so petty; freedom from inhibition, freedom from another’s agenda, and freedom from old habits. The biggie usually has had something to do with financial freedoms, and freedom from that vicious circle wherein the more you make, the more you spend and owe.

Today, I am fully aware that I am still searching for what freedom, ultimate freedom, will mean for me. I am fully aware that within my freedom quest, the constant throughout the years has been my aching for a complete freedom from responsibility, seemingly impossible when Kuleana may be one of the strongest value drivers I have: How can someone possibly break free from a value which has shaped their very identity?

I have also thought of Freedom as a virtue, and in many ways I still do:

Freedom. Something we take for granted much too much. Think of all the ways you are unshackled and free to make your choices, and it becomes clear that most of us know no other way to live. Within virtue, we set our hearts free.

From A new December Tradition: Twelve Aloha Virtues.

Ha‘aha‘a can get you to think quite differently

Then just this past week, Amy Palko stopped me in my tracks with a quote she shared in response to my shout-out for more wisdom on humility. Amy offered this one by William Temple, once the Archbishop of Canterbury:

“Humility does not mean thinking less of yourself than of other people, nor does it mean having a low opinion of your own gifts.

It means freedom from thinking about yourself at all.”

Well, that certainly is not a freedom I have understood that well yet! (Case in point this Sunday Mālama essay, and yet I continue writing it…)

In my life’s beginnings, freedom simply meant the freedom of complete self-indulgence, something we all have as infants, not then realizing how good we have it! We lose this freedom quickly, eagerly trading it for a growing consciousness of the other people in our lives, and completely unaware that we will soon miss this freedom terribly.  When you are young, you feel like your life is run by other people; notably your family, your teachers and neighbors, and even the preacher you listen to every Sunday who you are quite sure wouldn’t even recognize you if away from the pew you sat in week after week as part of his congregation. This desire to be free from adults (and free from my younger siblings) was a freedom I eventually succumbed to redefining as freedom of choice, ruefully accepting that didn’t necessarily mean of my choice.

When I was fifteen I got my first part-time job to help my parents with our mounting bills, and I got my earliest lessons in financial freedom from my dad. It made perfect sense to me then, that lesson number one in money management went like this: Only half of my paycheck (and none of my tips) went into my bank account (withdrawals thereafter forbidden until I graduated from college), and the rest went to that of the family. Kuleana, and my personal sense of responsibility had already moved in: Now it would really get comfortable, settle in and never move out again.

In 2003 I had what I consider to be a huge, life-changing financial freedom milestone; freedom from an employer, and from the concept that you work for a paycheck until you can ‘afford’ the luxury of working on your own dreams and not someone else’s. Becoming self-employed meant way more to me than the sensibility of working for profit (versus paycheck) and working with intellectual property that was yours free and clear; self-employment meant that I could start to claim the value of Ho‘ohana with full authenticity. Ho‘ohana had been a value I articulated for myself since my study of Hawai‘i’s values began, but I knew I wasn’t close to personally achieving it yet.

So was that my ultimate freedom?

At the time. But like so many other things, once you get them you start looking for the next thing… and so yeah, I’m still in this search for what my newest ultimate freedom will be. What I have come to realize however, is that the search has segued from exasperating and exhausting, to intoxicating and exhilarating.

By all accounts, anyone else would look at my life now and hold me up as a great example of someone who has achieved all the freedoms she could possibly hope for. To want for more freedom seems spoiled and whiny— and I even think so; I’d be the first to agree with that! But this is not an exercise in being a “should-er” or more angelic and noble; freedom-marching is about self-actualization, and using every single faculty you have to use as a way of saying Mahalo, thank you for the largesse of this wonder called my life. I may not fully deserve the gift, but I will do all I can to live in a way that’s a constant effort of becoming worthy of it.

Oh dear. Reading back over this it seems I have turned my back and said “No.” to William Temple… I suppose “freedom from thinking about yourself at all” is just not a freedom I’m ready to tackle.

What about you?

What is the freedom you pursue these days? Can you tell us about it? That will truly help me be less self-absorbed about this... I could graduate to what William Temple describes one day; it will surely be a worthy pursuit.

[Photo Credits: "Be seeing you" by Olivander, "Palestinian kids- Beit Jala" by FREEPAL, and "Free falling / Weightless" by Georgie Sharp, all on Flickr.]

Comments

[Nadine Touzet]

Rosa,

I have always been self-employed, and because that wasn't so much a choice as a practical decision, the sense of freedom I may derive from it is probably slightly different from yours.

My real sense of freedom came when under the pressure of health and other problems, I was able to free myself from the tyranny of self-employed-ness. Being able perhaps not to refuse work, but to feel that I could refuse it if I wanted/needed to.

During a particular dark period of my life, I read Julia Cameron's book and the morning pages proved to be an invaluable source of support. Words, and language, have an undeniable healing quality about them.

[Rosa Say]

Nadine, I have yet to think of it in that way, perhaps because I am still in a honeymoon period of sorts with my self-employment freedoms, but I can see how there can be a "tyranny" associated with being one's own boss... there usually isn't anyone as hard on us as we can be on ourselves.

When we become ill, we can so quickly realize how our health becomes the great equalizer, putting everything else in proper perspective - or making everything else a moot point. Julia's morning pages have that magic of self-healing I think, for the simple practice seems to flush us out from the inside, something we all need at times. I am glad to know it helped you!

[amypalko]

Do you know, Rosa, when I left you that quote, I left it because it just called to me instinctively. I hadn't actually thought through the implications of what Temple was calling for, so I just love your consideration of it here. Perhaps it's actually more an aspiration that we can all strive for, and be better people for that striving, but that the majority of us will never truly attain that level of humility. I can't think of anyone other than the enlightened souls that grace, and have graced, our earth that can consciously live out this form of humility. I'm just thinking out loud here though, and could be completely on the wrong track!

[Joanna Young]

My goodness Rosa, that's a big set of philosophical questions.

I'm not sure about the idea of freedom from thinking about yourself at all. Is that really something to aspire to? Something that's compatible with the human condition?

Maybe I'm asking because I'm not on that search for freedom just now... looking in another direction, for rootedness, groundedness, presence. And I most definitely want to be there when I find it!

Joanna

[Rosa Say]

Amy and Joanna, I looked up who William Temple was (Wikipedia link under his name above) and that added knowledge put the quote into some context for me; that is to say I made some smaller assumptions then. For Joanna, like you, I started to wonder if such a thought was “compatible to the human condition”—phrasing that eluded me, thank you!

I now assume Temple meant to redirect us toward service to others and to the Lord. Pretty safe to say that I’m the one who took his quote to another extreme meaning, especially with the brain-stretching opportunity Sunday Mālama never fails to give me! …and so Amy, there is no such thing as being on the wrong track when it comes to Sunday Mālama :-)

Perhaps the most accurate thing to say is that freedom is highly relative to your context, thus my query about what it has been for others. There can be freedom from so many things, things that we may have wanted so desperately at one time, but once we get them they lose their luster and attractiveness. Marriage is one example; while this is blasphemous to my Catholic upbringing, I think that “until death do us part” is a very unrealistic promise for anyone to make —and as we celebrate our 25 wedding anniversary this year, I think my hubby would agree that we have been extraordinarily lucky.

By the way Joanna, I appreciate the direction you are taking, for your search “for rootedness, groundedness, presence” certainly has affected the rest of us in a number of very positive ways! I for one feel very privileged to be on the journey with you :-)