Back…

It’s been a long time. Plenty has happened. In the world and in my world as well. Some good things have actually been happening as I have been deconstructing my life, looking at how I got to this point, and deciding where I want to go from here.

People speak about freedom as this glorious thing. It can be, but that depends on what you do with it. Particularly, freedom is all of the things, not just the good things. It is a lack of oppression, but a bounty of choices. It is not doing what has been done, but not necessarily knowing what to do. It is divesting from known systems, but having to construct entirely new ones. What of what I have learned do I keep and what do I need to start from scratch on? 

Freedom to fly and freedom to fall. Freedom to be successful, but also to be a failure. Just free will, the most base level thing that a person should have. However, because we subsist under systems that give freedom to the chosen few and pre-selected choices to the rest of us, we look at freedom as the end of the rainbow, not a new beginning as it is.

I think about Sula Mae Peace, the title character from Toni Morrison’s novel Sula. Sula was a free woman, however, her expressions of freedom barely served her. She presumably did what she wanted, yet ultimately there’s not telling what it actually yielded her. For people who believe that life is for itself, she lived well. For those who believe it should have greater meaning, she lived a life that didn’t matter. Ultimately I believe that Morrison wanted to communicate that freedom without responsibility or vision is just chaos.

I have done a lot of work on myself in recent years and I see the progress. It was a tremendous undertaking to start, effectively undoing 30 plus years of life in order to change it to serve me. I think about the movie Angel Eyes and how the male protagonist talked about scratch. Starting from little and building to much. It is a long, hard road, but so is living in general. I’m grateful to be working hard on something that I will reap the greatest benefit to. I am my own lifelong project and as much as the world works on manufactured timelines, I find myself focusing more on enjoying now while also building a good future. Going to counseling, holding myself accountable, and looking more closely at what I do and how it impacts things has been a rewarding, but heavy process. I’ve never much had the patience for process, but I am working at it. I am working at developing the good characteristics that I believe I will need to live a good life. Trial and error, with plenty of errors. There are victories too, though, and I am continuing to build on those victories to know a better life.

There is so much to unlearn and retool. This is the best time for it. The world is shifting around us. Myths given to us as facts are being debunked right before our eyes. Things we have been taught as absolutes are being revealed as simply the setup of systems. I can only hope that more and more people take this opportunity to build the better things that we need in this world, starting with ourselves. It’s going to take some going back to go forward, but you’re going to keep coming back anyway, just like most lost people do…