This was once the first line of a short story I wrote: "Freedom and loneliness are an amalgam that hardens with age." As a story opener, some found it too heavy-handedly authorial. Never mind, I liked it. I wrote it about an imagined version of my of guitar teacher, a man who clung to the freedom to be the musician he was at heart, but who paid a heavy price.
While travelling alone in Bolivia, I was continually confronted with this "amalgam". Freedom and its price in loneliness. And I often thought about the idea of freedom. Does there come a point at which the notional freedom of travelling becomes in itself a prison? Gross freedom of movement becoming ultimately more imprisoning than the more subtle freedoms offered by staying put? After all, if all I desire is the security and comfort of family and home, to travel is no freedom at all, but exile.
It seemed to me sometimes that freedom was nothing but the feeling of freedom, of wind-in-my-face and salt-lakes at dusk, of maps with no itineraries and nobody to ever call me back from any wild road I chose. Once that feeling gives way to a sense of desolation, what freedom is there left to speak of, however unencumbered one may be? And if I feel free at home, in the midst of friends and work and belongings then surely that is no less freedom?
More philosophically, there is negative freedom - freedom from - and positive freedom: freedom to. The latter is the killer. We can be free of oppression, free of sickness, poverty, encumbrance and responsibility, and yet lack freedom for the lack of imagination or courage to know what to do with it. Here we touch on existentialism and its notions of freedom of choice and "bad faith". We'd rather not be free, and rail against our restrictions, than leap into the unknown and confront our incapacity to know what freedom is for. Confront in fact our responsibility for choosing what we make of our lives. You can be absolutely free, and then realise that the only choice that makes sense is to burden yourself with commitment again.
And yet, the sweetness of freedom tasted! At least for me, the moments in which I have had that taste, in which I have drunk those winds of freedom, are some of the sweetest in my memory. But maybe that's not true for everyone? I'd like to hear.
Why does the amalgam of freedom and loneliness harden with age? Because freedom's sweetness comes from its possibilities, and age prunes possibilities. Freedom without possibilities is anomie, the desolation of meaningless consumer "choices" pursued for the lack of anything else, or, at the other end of the scale, the "freedom" of the bum. Seen this way, freedom can never be an end in itself, but only an enabling condition, a fertile space in which something good can take shape...
We can talk about free will of course - if someone feels that poor donkey hasn't been thrashed within an inch of its life. We can talk about political freedom, though it's a topic of less than burning interest to us citizens of this complacent democracy. Are we free? I mean, in this country, this time, this system of life? I suggest we're a lot less free than our hunter-gatherer ancestors, if freedom is the feeling of wind in your hair, sunset over hills you may climb tomorrow if you feel brave... And a lot more free if freedom is the range of possibilities open to a human to express him or herself. Define your terms.
Rules of engagement? To be consistent with the topic, I suppose I should say there'll be none. But I would like to encourage a truer freedom than no rules would actually likely allow - since being free would in this case no doubt mean being free to do what we always do. So I'm invoking our friend Bohm again. I'll try to remember to bring a symbol of freedom to be talked to, or held in the hand as a talking stick.
