What Freedom REALLY Feels Like
For three months, I went on a strange limbo of being under a writer’s block spell and at the same time being overly inspired. It’s like a very weird virus. Or an itch. And the itch is just screaming out to you, yet you cannot for the life of you, begin to scratch its ugly head off.
OK. Graphic.
FREEDOM had always been one of those topics which are deemed both loved and taboo-filled. It has always been one of the things swirling around my head, begging me to let loose into discussion.
We all have notions of freedom. If asked to draw a mural of all of our combined imaginations, it would be both glorious and deformed.
Freedom, when we really allow ourselves to see it clearly, is HIDEOUS. Then really beautiful and effervescent. Messy. Fixed. Androgynous and yet universal.
Whenever I blurt out the word “freedom” or “liberty” in my head, I think of free thoughts and speech. I think of that little girl who goes around and rambles on about gibberish. She babbles onto everyone that’s within earshot. She’s built on ramblings and at the same time wisdom from beyond her time. She exudes innocence and ingenuity. She is calm and yet calculating in her childish pranks.
I am reminded of those stereotypical monks roaming around the streets. I remember the first time I saw them, how I was in awe and in wonder that they truly live beyond the pages that I read them from. Freedom then feels like the fortitude and control they harness from years of trying to live within their principles and less from the world’s clutching fleshly desires. It looks like the wind blowing through their robes as they sit in emptiness and wholeness all at the same time.
But freedom is also found in the most gruesome of wars. It is found in the clash of faiths, ideologies and advocacies. It is bold and unyielding. It knows colours and sees the weight of flag poles. It saves orphans and yet bears some along the way as well. It asks for blood and sacrifice in exchange for peace or dominance. Liberties for one may be the same one that shackles up another. It costs a lot and gives so much more in the end.
I steer a little closer to home and freedom nudges me to the hearts of women, almost broken by love, lust, infatuation and other drugs. It is there where blinders are shut closed to make way for selfish choices no one knows about, and sometimes, only a few care about. It lies softly with every attempt at risking their hearts, to trust, be duped, enamoured, and fail over and over again. But it also rests in between the courage of teardrops one by one leaving each eye to soothe the battered feelings, the bruised pride and the shattered relationship they once had. Freedom is the final step out the rusty door of deceit and manipulation, into another unknown, always beckoning to be more and do better this time around.
But inevitably, we also feel freedom in two clanging coins of hatred and judgement and unity and acceptance. When faiths clash, freedom resounds violently. When ethnicities fight over who is superior, freedom watches silently. She is there in amidst the trembling voices and the audacious speaker. She boasts of twisted beliefs but also of noble causes. As one lawyer put it accurately, it is a god-given and inalienable right. It is in the rising empathy for Syrian refugee families and the determination of world leaders to be a part of the end of the suffering. It is a catalyst for radical change for the way people see human rights and whoever should “deserve” them.
Whenever the political me tries to whisper over, I imagine freedom to be the unseen wings spurring on patriots disguised in the ordinary labor man who honestly earns his day’s wage for his family, that man or woman serving with the uniform while everyday meeting danger in the streets, that lawyer striving on towards tricky procedures and the weight of the old systems just to uphold the rights of the oppressed, or that witty reporter out and about pouring over his research and the lies of society just to cover that coveted headline for the masses. It is found in that one congress person who braves his way through the rotten way of bending and breaking of the rules. He musters a little more courage each day to protect and uphold his principles, hoping one day the old ways will be just remnants of the past and the laws will see a new skin, a new daylight.
You see, we always have that dreamy, often products of wishful thinking, versions of freedom we would like to believe. Most of us opt for the sunshine-y side of lady liberty. One which every crevice of our individual needs is met and overflowing. We would not like to believe or prefer to defer believing that freedom also looks like the ugliness of modern society which we need to endure due to our personal choices, misgivings and misjudgments.
But to truly meet the freedom we hope for, that which our faiths promise, we need to accept that freedom, while magnificent in all its splendour, is always coupled with the debris of the things we detest. Those we’d rather not have in our daily lives. Freedom is so all-encompassing that it serves as a double player in the areas of politics, love and family. It is what makes a society one worthy living in. It never ceases to transform and evolve, accommodating each person’s qualms and ideologies. It takes your breath away with how much you can do with it, and how much it takes away in the same vein.
At this point though, being truly free remains to be open for tailor-fitting for every person. We may be privileged yet shackled, devastated yet liberated, unchained yet disabled. Freedom is a point of view. It just takes one person who can see and accept it in both its hideousness and glory to make it into something everyone can benefit from.
May we always be catalysts of the right way to offer and promote the freedom that we long for. May we not struggle too much in relieving ourselves from the delusions of its selfish versions. May we always learn to protect not just our own freedom, but that of others — the voiceless and unheard — as much as they continue to pray for the achievement of their own.
