Freedom

I remember when my first boy was born, my wife and I were adamant that his arrival would not change our lives and hamper our freedom. We would still travel the world, go to parties and enjoy our social world - he would do all this with us. And so it was. We travelled, discovered that the world related to you differently when you were a parent. A baby was of course an attraction, people delighted in bouncing and coo-ing and in some places tutting and scolding (particularly in Italy). We partied, Sam slept when he was tired. All cool. Then baby number two came along and we found we just couldn’t keep this up.

After our second son was born we decided to move from London. I remember pushing the buggy up Camden High Street, the lorries belching diesel fumes, the noise, navigating the endless tide of people. Our cosy North London lifestyle was no longer doing it. So we packed up and moved. Money was tight and we ended up in the West Country with two small children and a building project. I was commuting to London to work half the week and trying to create work closer to home. It was a stressful time and looking back now I would say I was depressed. Life felt overwhelming and it seemed that every thought, action and communication was about the children. I felt hemmed in and squeezed out. There was in all this no space for me just to be me and it felt as if my children and family life had robbed me of my freedom.

What is this thing that we call freedom. I will be more specific, I craved Freedom of Choice & Free Will. That’s what I felt had disappeared. From Wikipedia, "Free will is the ability to choose between different possible courses of action unimpeded”. Does that actually ever occur? 

I have an idea that it would be nice to go on a long bike ride right now. I have another idea that right now I need to put the kids to bed. These two ideas are opposed. My free will is impeded. If I choose bike ride, how free will I feel knowing that I need to put the kids to bed. At the other end of the dilemma, how free will I feel forgoing the ride and doing what I said I would do. Does making a choice, any choice, bring an inevitable sacrifice of freedom?

The idea of freedom implies that we are unlimited, unbound and unfettered. The reality of our existence belies this myth. We are animals with a nervous system that responds in quite mechanical ways to stimuli. We have a body that can only run so fast lift so much, bend so far. We have no freedom from limits in our physical reality. 

What then is the extent of our freedom in our minds and in the vast open spaces of our imaginations. When we see with our eyes we mostly perceive a shorthand version of what is actually there. For most of us it takes strong psychedelic drugs to loosen our minds grip on perception and allow us to see colour unbound by form. Our imaginings are populated with people, places and events that we have recorded, that we have taken a snapshot of. The freedom to wander the halls of our imagination is limited to that which we have experienced.

And yet most of us have known or glimpsed freedom - have tasted its sweetness, the vast scintillating stillness, the awesome hugeness, the sublime intricate interconnectedness of consciousness. The source of everything, the spring from which all of THIS arises. We are beings of consciousness - consciousness manifest as bodies with arms and legs and… limits. We are the marriage of divine source made mortal. When we can drop back to here, when we can reconnect to the divine spark that innervates the very cells of our bodies, then we are free. 

When I was struggling with the lack of freedom that fatherhood brought, it was the utopian idea of freedom that I was fixated on. The weight of responsibility, the constant need for money, support, time, were all identified with the opposite idea of lack-of-freedom. My life was polarised and I was lost fighting against the lack and yearning for freedom. If I had been able then to drop back and see the bigger frame, then I might have noticed that everything that was arising was consciousness as freedom expressing itself.  That would have been very relieving.