Freedom

[this is not a note about determinism]

'Cause it's a bittersweet symphony this life

Trying to make ends meet, you're a slave to the money then you die

I'll take you down the only road I've ever been down

You know the one that takes you to the places where all the veins meet, yeah

No change, I can't change, I can't change, I can't change,

but I'm here in my mold , I am here in my mold

But I'm a million different people from one day to the next

I can't change my mold, no, no, no, no, no

- The Verve - Bitter Sweet Symphony

Only 600 miles to the south, there's a vast city. And here you find civilized man. Civilized man refused to adapt himself to his environment; instead, he adapted his environment to suit him. So he built cities, roads, vehicles, machinery, and he put up power lines to run his labor-saving devices. But somehow he didn't know where to stop. The more he improved his surroundings to make life easier, the more complicated he made it. So now his children are sentenced to 10-15 years of school, just to learn how to survive in this complex and hazardous habitat they were born into. And civilized man, who refused to adapt to his surroundings, now finds he has to adapt and re-adapt every hour of the day to his self-created environment. For instance, if it's Monday and 7:30 comes up, you have to dis-adapt from your domestic surroundings and re-adapt yourself to an entirely different environment. 8:00 means everybody has to look busy. 10:30 means you can stop looking busy for 15 minutes. And then you have to look busy again. And so your day is chopped into pieces, and in each segment of time you adapt to a new set circumstances. No wonder some people go off the rails a bit...

- The Gods Must Be Crazy

The things Man does in life: being born, spending 30 years or so preparing to live in Man’s own construct, spending another 30 years or so establishing life in that construct, and finally spending the years left remembering the past and preparing for his demise.

Faced with such a revelation, it is only appropriate if Man asks this question,

 “Where is freedom?”

And indeed such a question that is.
Where is freedom in all of these ‘shackles’ Man dares to call proper living?
Does it lie in Man’s release?

I once heard a man answered.
He said no.
Freedom does not lie in Man’s release.
It is not even about the shackles.
Rather, it is the realization upon the shackles’ existence.

I stopped and thought.
What issue was horizontal is now made vertical.
Because freedom is not an unconstrained state, it is a bird’s eye notion.
And every time Man connects with his true self, he’s free.

But I asked the man anyway.
Is it not just gibberish?
Is it not called running away, fantasy of a drawn man defeated by the shackles?

The man said no.
Because in such freedom no Man cowers in his mind,
Man just lives his life differently.
Freedom alters Man’s way of being, his existence is now anew.
Stand tall to the skies Man does, on ground his feet still true.

I’ve never believed the man.
But I’ve never stopped wanting to.