Freedom

Day 70. Freedom.

Most of us understand the price of freedom. It is never free, it often comes with a cost few are willing to pay. We watch as our soldiers defend our Country against enemies, we watch as slaves in third-world countries struggle to be free. A more personal battle for freedom lies close to many of us: a test we must pass before we move on to greater things.

When we put up with any situation we don’t have to put up with, it’s not because we’re dumb. We put up with it, because we want the lesson only that situation can teach, and we want it more than freedom itself. Richard Bach, Running from Safety: An Adventure of the Spirit

Not everyone is capable of escaping bad situations. It's hard to imagine an abused child finding a way out by themselves, they need the help of caring adults giving them the love they need. Abused spouses often remain loyal for decades, knowing there is a better place but unable to scrape together the courage to walk away. Eldercare sometimes contains abuses of the harshest kind upon some of the most fragile, yet they often have no recourse but to lay silently in pain and hope their loved ones notice the bruises. These things seem to have an easy answer: just leave. But as anyone who's been there knows, its not so cut and dry. While all are poor substitutes for a decent life, the most difficult to escape is less obvious. No abuse, no bruises, simply a life without love.

We all know someone who's been trapped by their love for someone that they seem blind to anything negative. The cheating spouse, that "everyone" has seen around town with someone else, but the faithful wife refuses to admit it wasn't her perfume on his clothes. The husband who has dinner alone, while his wife is out work her single co-worker friends "just once or twice a week, it's no big deal." The middle-aged woman, feeling alone and cold, while her spouse is working late "again." The girlfriend that just has to have her "girls night out" while the boyfriend wonders why the bar scene is still important if she really wants a commitment from him.

Worse than that, the couple that sits at home night after night, yet might as well be on different planets. He's reading the paper, she's napping in the recliner. They speak in grunts at one another, barely hearing the questions that go unanswered. No one ever really cared about the answer anyway, it was just busy talk. Keeping up appearances for the kids and grandkids, doing the usual holiday routine as if everything is normal. Both living one life during the daylight hours, and a lie after the sun sets. Both watching the clock tick faster, their lives passing in a blur, yet seemingly unable to move in a different direction. Maybe it's not a choice to stand there. Maybe it's because they're still learning from the experience. But what lesson is there in misery? In loneliness?

The price of freedom is, as I said before, sometimes more than we are willing to pay. Fear of making a mistake. Fear of losing our family, our friends. All those risks, all the unknowns, all the things that can go wrong. Easier to be miserable where you are than to take a chance and lose everything, right?

Nope You have to be willing to risk EVERYTHING to have ANYTHING.

Bonus quote from Richard Bach: Bad things are not the worst things that an happen to us. NOTHING is the worst thing that can happen to us.

Lesson Seventy: Are you willing to wait for things to happen? Can you find the freedom you seek sitting on your couch? Think about what it takes to find YOUR freedom, and reach for that brass ring.

660 to go...