Hey!
Recently, I’ve been feeling like I’m stuck at a junction of a zillion paths, completely paralyzed and unable to make a choice and go down one.
The opportunities are there. I have the physical and the financial means.
So what’s the problem?
All signs point to one place:
Me.
Clearly, I’m not ready yet, not strong enough, not courageous enough, not bold enough, not confident enough, not motivated enough, not whatever enough.
Something’s lacking and I somehow need to get or cultivate it.
In the meantime, which could be days or decades, I’ll set up shop at this junction, in a way, like I’ve always done, and take whatever happens to fall into my lap as the thing I’m meant to be doing at that moment.
“Oh wow, you’ve been doing that for ten years. How did you get into that?
“No idea.”
Anyone who recognizes this knows the contradictory feeling of seemingly having everything going for you, and yet feeling completely and utterly stuck.
It’s like you’re freer than ever, while also being more trapped than ever.
So what does this say about how “free” you actually are?
I think more people are experiencing this feeling than ever.
In the external, physical world, we have more freedom than at any other time in history.
Yet at the same time, in our internal, mental and emotional worlds, there seems to be more and more people feeling stuck, lost, and powerless.
This is no coincidence.
In the modern world, we commonly think of freedom as the ability to choose who you want to be, what you want to do or have, and what you want to say.
This is “freedom of choice”: meaning that you are able to choose your own course of action and pattern of living. Clearly, this is incredibly important.
However, having freedom of choice does not correlate to freedom on an internal, mental and emotional level—and can often work against it.
This internal freedom is less talked about—probably cos’ it’s harder to see. You can often see when someone is being physically retrained, subjugated, or discriminated against. It’s more difficult to see when someone’s mind is held captive or in shackles.
Buddhist peeps and deep thinkers like Victor Frankl and Nelson Mandela have helped to illuminate this internal freedom and distinguish it from the external type.
They realized that, when all physical freedoms are taken away from us, we still possess the greatest of all freedoms and the most powerful force humans have: the ability to choose how to act.
This is because internal freedom is not about choice and options and comforts, it’s an ability to know and to do what needs to be done and what is right.
Internal freedom is not a sense of more, but of less.
Internal freedom is not a sense of infinite openness, but of finite restriction.
Not a sense of being able to do or be what you want, but of knowing yourself intimately and being bound into taking the correct course of action.
Internal freedom is not choice, it’s choicelessness or inevitability.
This sounds like fascism or what North Korea would tell you. Like you can only be free when you’re forced into a corner and don’t have options.
Mmmm, rice!
But rather, it’s meant to demonstrate how endlessly chasing freedom of choice can rob us of our ability to truly be free.
More comfort and services do not make us freer, they lock us into complacency and dependency.
More choices and options do not make us freer, they shackle us into uncertainty and indecision.
More pleasures and luxuries do not make us freer, they imprison us in distraction and self-gratification.
Some of the above is clearly a good thing. Life wouldn’t be worth living without hot showers and a range of dark chocolate to choose from.
The problem is when we confuse more of these things with more freedom.
Many of us today find solace in the above precisely because they grant us a sense of freedom—whether that be security, independence, power, prestige, or ease.
This sense or illusion of freedom is inherently unstable and unreliable, and, paradoxically, not able to be grasped or maintained in any lasting way, meaning we get locked into chasing it and it’s actually quite the opposite of freedom. Anything that seems or claims to give you freedom can’t be freedom, cos’ it ain’t yours.
What makes this illusion of freedom so enticing is that, on the surface, it appears to be exactly what it claims to be.
Sitting around all day in your jammies, not dealing with adulting, and ordering UberEats in between playing Fallout and watching porn seems pretty damn free.
While at the same time, actual freedom can appear like all-out slavery.
Sticking to a schedule, having responsibilities and commitments, having dinner with your parents, eating the same salad for lunch, saving money, and getting good credit seems pretty damn enslaving.
But actually, returning to the definition of internal freedom as “the ability to know and to do what needs to be done and what is right”, these are often exactly what is needed, not just to give ourselves some structure and direction, but to also protect ourselves against the temptations and traps of the illusions of freedom.
A core tenet of Buddhism is that how we act, not what circumstances we find ourselves in, is the determining factor of our freedom.
That’s why the whole philosophy is about cultivating discipline and gaining a sense of mastery or control over your attention: reducing distraction, slowing down, cutting junk out of life, silence, simplifying things, doing one thing at a time, reducing options and possibilities.
It’s only through this restrictive journey, that seems like the antithesis of freedom, that we can become free to see and do what needs to be done.
Going back to my junction of a zillion paths.
I sit, imagining what would happen if I stopped worrying about making the right decision and what I don’t have enough of, and instead, I exercise my freedom of how to act in this moment, and the next, and the next, seeing that the only thing that stands between me and everything is not me, it’s my mind.
The paths suddenly reduce to one, and I walk ahead, amazed and terrified.
Until next time, big hugs,
Joe