Freedom is everywhere

This July 4th we will once again celebrate our freedoms. Funny then, how many of us live forever trapped in our head and constrained by our limiting thoughts

In the days when Circuses had live animals, you would wonder how a 10,000 lb elephant could be held in place by a small stake in the ground. The reason is that from the time that elephant was a baby it was tied to that stake and it spent hours pulling on it but to no avail and it eventually gave up. The elephant grew up to be so large it could pull the stake out with one swing, yet it stayed rooted to the spot because in its mind it believed that it could not pull it out.

In listening to many teenagers they will frequently say: “I can’t wait to get out of school and be free”. Little do they know that under the roof of their parents, their life will never be freer. No bills, no heavy responsibilities and just show up where and when you’re told, and you can enjoy a fairly quiet adolescence. Plenty of time to contemplate life, the world and your place in it. 

Once out of school, however, is where the real fun begins. Laundry doesn’t do itself, you have to use your own money to pay for even the most basic of services and there is frequently more week left at the end of your money. You still have to show where and when you’re told, this time through necessity rather than to placate your parents. 

Later on, you might get married and have a family and suddenly you have additional little people that rely on what you do with your day. Before you know it, your choices are even more limited and one day you blink and 30 years have passed and you wonder, where did the time go?.

You had often longed for the day your kids would leave the house and you were free to take that trip and buy that car you always wanted, and now it’s here. Maybe you now have the time to finally fix up that car that has sat in the garage for the past 20 years. Then some time passes and you suddenly realize that you miss those kids and that you will never get that time back. You’ll long for the day that the only thing crawling up your legs were clingy kids rather than varicose veins. 

Then one day you visit your parents and realize that dad isn’t walking so well and mom’s razor sharp memory is now slipping and then before you know it,  they are gone. Then, only in your dreams, can you enter once more through the front door of your childhood home, smell dinner wafting through the hallway, hear dad pontificating about the day and  realize that in that time you were at your most carefree. 

The problem with many people is that they are either looking back or looking forward and very rarely are they living in the now, and it is in the now where the real power is. Like that circus elephant you are only really trapped by the confines of your own mind. The richness of living in the moment and appreciating that everything that is, rather than what might be or might have been, is truly the key to being free.  The famous Physician and Holocaust Survivor, Victor Frankl once said: “Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of human freedoms – to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.”

If Dr. Frankl can live in the moment and feel free while enduring truly horrific conditions, then what’s our excuse?