True Freedom

Your freedom is not real. Where you went wrong is when you asked someone else for your freedom.You cannot have your own freedom if you ask someone to set you free. By demanding your freedom from someone, you are begging with the assumption it was theirs to have in the first place. It was not. But, it is hard to realize this because your mind tells you that freedom is something that can be given. It is not. It is something that is taken, and you take it when you finally realize that it was you who originally gave it away. You gave it away the minute you demanded to have it back. When you demand it you are giving them the decision to grant or deny your request. How are you free when the decision is not yours? Now stop. Look again at this scenario and realize with whom the power truly lies. You. The power lies with you. When you demand your freedom, you give a freedom of choice to your "opressor." When you ask them for freedom, you give them the choice to forever hold you in their grasp. Now, just as easily, you can deny them this choice by never asking anything of them in the first place, by never acknowledging they ever had any kind of power over you. You can deny their choice by embreacing the truth that it is not their decision. It is yours.If you were truly free, would you even need someone to tell you so? No. When you are truly free, no one need tell you. When you are truly free, it cannot be described with words; you only know it is so, and you realize that your freedom was always there for you to take. Do you want to be free? Be free...because freedom is a mindset. Do you want to sit around and look for resons why the grass is greener on the other side? That's  a mindset too, a mindset that can never and will never set you free...because it will never let you see how green your grass already is. Differences exist because you choose to see them. Maybe you can argue that you see differences because they exist. Either way, it is still your mind that turns those differences into dividers. It is your mind that tells you to hate what makes you "different" and to envy what makes others "unique." It is your mind that blinds you from how enviable your own life already is. The solution? Change your mindset, not the world's mindset, just yours. It will take time for you to change your own mindset, and even longer for the world to change its, but length of journey should never be a detterent to its travel. So, start with you and the rest of the world will follow. When the world finally sees what freedom truly is, the world will choose to be so, that choice it's first act of freedom.

"Let him that would move the world, first move himself." -Socrates

"Be the change you want to see in the world." - Mahatma Gandhi

Fear: Stuck in a Bind

Within a musical named The Civil War, there is a piece, "The Peculiar Institution." In this piece there is a group of lyrics that really speak to me. They are as follows:
       "And it feels more like dying than living when somebody ain't free."
Though these lyrics are apt to describe the situation the actor's are portraying, I feel they can also be applied to other situations. When the words are seen alone, out of context of the musical, their meaning can begin to relate to many situations. I consider fear to be one of the strongest binds against a person's freedom, and as the lyrics say, a life without freedom feels more like death.

With the conclusion that fear is an enemy of freedom and a restriction to a fulfilled life, I am similarly reminded of the poem "A dream Deferred" by Langston Hughes:        

What happens to a dream deferred?
Does it dry up
like a raisin in the sun?
Or fester like a sore--
And then run?
Does it stink like rotten meat?
Or crust and sugar over-- like a syrupy sweet?

Maybe it just sags
like a heavy load.Or does it explode? This makes me not only question the future of that deferred deam, but also further encourages me to ponder the future of the deferring dreamer. What happens to the people who defer their dreams? Why did they defer thier dreams? Did fear keep them from fulfilling their dreams? Do they die with the regret that they never sought to answer their greatest "what if" or greatest "I wish?" Do they die feeling as if they had never lived? Do they wish they had lived chasing their dreams rather than slowly dying in a nightmare? Do they find relief from the burden of regret only in death? And to think, that burden began with a bind: fear.

How much freer would they have been without fear clinging to their hearts and chaining their souls? Without that bind, life would have been their's for the taking, freedom absolute. If they had persued life in the fashion they had deepest wished, rather than as the aimeless wanderer fear had molded them into, they could have died knowing that they had lived. Their last breath, the freest they ever had.