Then how can I free myself ? you ask. You cannot escape necessities, but you can overcome them.” Seneca

Freedom, such a beatiful and grandious word.

Freedom is our highest value and yet, we are not and don’t want to be free at all.

Free form what?

Freedom from care is what I would like to argue. Bear with me, as I organize my ideas.

We all live in our subjective realities. Meanings differ like songs differ from one another. Freedom can be seen in many contexts, depending on the man and on his level of wisdom and understanding.

A vile man would argue that freedom is the satisfaction of every desire, even petty ones. Every food craving, sexual or anything that the body requires to satisfy a hole that can never be really filled. There is no freedom in craving. Pursuing cravings and physical desire uninhibitedly just makes us slaves to those very desires, and so freedom is not achieved.

If freedom is not to be found there, then where do we have to look?

What is freedom anyway? I’d define it as a state, a state in which the individual or the thing itself is not attached to anything outside that mandates a determinate action.

What are those things “outside” of ourselves that mandate action?

We could argue that it can be a tyrant, the state, our families, our cravings, just about everything.

What is truly ours? in ultimate instance?

Victor Frankl, psychiatrist and jew survivor of the holocaust, writes beautifully in his book Man’s search for meaning:

Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.” ― Viktor E. Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning

There, deep inside ourselves, lies the last of human freedoms, the capacity to choose our attitude towards fate, only once we have made this choice can we start acting as individuals and speak loudly to fate where it is that we want to go.

In life, there comes a time to make a decision. I’d say it’s the ultimate decision of a human being. That decision is how we are going to look at the world, as an oppressor, or as a friend. How are we going to live, voluntarily or forcefully?

There, in that question freedom takes its true and last meaning, we are free to make that choice and that choice is the most important choice we will ever make.

Albert Einstein backs this.

“The most important decision we make is whether we believe we live in a friendly or hostile universe.”― Albert Einstein

Let me explain.

When we do things forcefully, we don’t enjoy them, we don’t put our light into what we are doing and so we act from darkness. We are not making a choice by living this way, someone is making the choice for us. This is not freedom.

When we choose to act, to grab any challenge that life gives us, we are acting from ourselves, our light is on and we can see things that we couldn’t see in darkness. This is freedom, the choice to act voluntarily and willingly.

This is the ultimate freedom.

Hope you all make the choice to live freedom this very moment.

Best of luck friends or better, inner wisdom.