“When I discover who I am, I’ll be free.”
-Ralph Ellison
I’ve been listening to the Art of Accomplishment podcast for a long time (and am a graduate of the associated Connection Course and Connection Challenge). The podcast often has gems, but this week was perhaps my favourite, maybe because it comes at a time that feels so aligned with where I’m at right now; it’s all about freedom.
“I’m not constrained by the voice in my head or by the thoughts of the people around me or by some set of ‘shoulds’ that society may place. And that freedom is a birthright. Right now every single person can be themselves. There’s nothing stopping them. There are consequences, potentially. You might not like them. You might choose to not be yourself because you don’t like the consequences. That’s all true. It doesn’t mean you can’t be yourself.“
—Joe Hudson
As much as this resonates and I enjoyed the whole thing, I also want to throw in a ‘yes, and’ regarding freedom. As Joe puts it, freedom of the kind we’re journeying to find is about the freedom to be who we are.
But as soon as we think we are doing this as a self, we’re falling into a trap. We so easily lose our freedom. Why?
At one point, Joe mentions Maslow, that having our basic needs met helps in some ways, and paradoxically, having an abundance of resources can get in the way of freedom, because freedom takes work and vigilance, and people with abundant resources may have more to lose, in a sense, or because material benefits can make us lazy.
Maslow, as we know, had himself a little bit of a warped view. His pyramid was an unacknowledged adaptation, really an inversion of indigenous thinking that places responsibility to one another and the world around us as a necessary condition for having what we need.
When we seek to be free without considering how our actions, behaviours, and beliefs prevent other people’s freedom, we are still caught up in something; we’re still entangled. Joe uses Mandela as an example of being free even when his body was imprisoned. And Mandela famously said, “For to be free is not merely to cast off one’s chains, but to live in a way that respects and enhances the freedom of others.“
There’s a paradox here, there’s a crack to fall through. People with status are less able to see certain aspects of their non-freedom. It’s possible to ‘feel free’ in a way that abdicates responsibility, and at the same time, part of freedom is that it’s about not trying to manage, fix, or even judge others or oneself. How can I be free and also belong? How can my freedom explicitly be integrated with yours?
Going deep into freedom means seeing where I’m engaging in dominance even without thinking about it or feeling identified with it. This isn’t to chastise myself or to feel guilt, it’s about recognising that true freedom is not possible in my context as a middle-class white North American, even as I taste freedom sometimes, when I am operating from love and curiosity rather than fear. That I am shaped even when I choose to ‘be myself.’ That true freedom for any individual may not exist, and yet is always available as a choice.
When I am free, I am by necessity not inhibiting your freedom. I am you.
The trick here (and it is a trickstery adventure) is to not call comfort freedom, to not get into spiritual materialism, to be both free and inexorably part of unfreedom, to be a decaying mess of microbes and mites and temporarily animated flesh and to be something else, to be nothing. To be as still as space and as fast as quantum particles. To be myself and bewildered. When I am free, it will not be me.