Exposing freedoms, finding intention
I’m standing on my balcony looking out over Putney Heath. There’s a runner on the pavement, and he’s kind of struggling. He’s committed and determined to run. He’s jogging. But his body is uncomfortable with it. It doesn’t come naturally, and he’s tired. His muscles are not used to this much demand from him. But they are still going. His jog is steady and he’s not slowing down.
As he bounces out of sight, another jogger comes into view, and then another. .
I go out for a walk in my neighbourhood, it’s my hour of exercise for the day, and all around, in their own private nooks and crannies, people are purposeful. A couple are doing time lapses on the grass. A man takes pictures of the council planted daffodils like he’s only just noticed them for the first time. Two siblings, an older sister and younger brother sit on their doorstep chatting. A family has set up a tyre swing on a tree outside their flat. Two toddlers take it in turns to peak through their balcony railings. My elderly neighbour downstairs, June, waters and prunes the flowers in her backyard — that said, June has always looked after her garden. People are surprisingly visible on my estate in ways that they haven’t been before. They’re no longer in commute mode. They’re being.
And that’s what I can see. I wonder what is happening indoors. I get a glimpse of it on my WhatsApp feed. We’re all aware of it, within ourselves and all around us.
There’s a burst of intention — just one of the many curious phenomena the Corona virus lockdown has led to. While on the one hand we are facing an unprecedented and previously unimaginable curtailment of our freedoms, it has also manufactured, by no divine intervention (or maybe there was some?), a new array of freedoms which we have become so accustomed to not having, even comfortable in their absence. It is like our freedom to move has blinded us to our lack of freedom to be, to create and to be compassionate, and has exposed the cracks. Within these cracks, tiny wild flowers are growing.
I reflect on my own creativity and way of being at this time, as with each passing day I find myself free to decide how I want to be, and how to navigate my moments, find my own delicate balance of obligations and desires. The limits on my freedom to associate and move, has cornered me to explore other aspects of my identity, of what I like doing, of my purpose. It has freed time and released structure. And in some ways demanded from me the rigour of self awareness and care I notice in children who self-direct their learning in community. And then there are those sweet moments, when I realise that my obligations are my desires. It’s nice to have the clarity to see those.
In the early days of the lockdown, as the floor fell from beneath my feet I resisted the urge to scamper and flail as I felt held. Sometimes it was my friends, sometimes it was family, sometimes colleagues, sometimes my partner, sometimes neighbours, sometimes it was my own sense of self. And then we started the work of building new structures and floors, and in each case we could decide what felt good, for all involved. We navigated and continue to navigate new spaces. We still can’t physically move, but we can re-imagine, squeeze, find ways and create. Friendship as the root of freedom.
At play, children constantly remake their rules and reinvent their structures and barriers. Lego gets built with over and over again. Clay and mud, sticks and stones. There is a constant reinvention and exploration into what feels good, what feels exciting and new, what meets needs. As we grow older, we seem to find security and stability in knowing how things work, knowing the rules, and then we get stuck with them. We continue to play Monopoly even though we despise its values. As humans, we live within the structures and rules of our ancestors, and this moment, this pause, is an invitation to knock down the lego castle, to consider all the sticks in the wood that were used to build that den and use those sticks, one by one, to build a new one. The Corona Virus has wiped out some of our rules, or at least invited us to question them. We look around us, and we’re suddenly free to think and to be in new ways. It’s Thursday today and earlier this evening at 8pm my neighbourhood came to a cacophony of life as people clapped, whistled and hooted for the NHS and key workers. Two neighbours came out with pots and pans and wooden spoons banging their expressions of support. “Show us your tits Elaine!” shouted my downstairs neighbour. Elaine laughed and banged harder on her pot. Even our neighbourhoods, the quintessential victim of the times are re-inventing themselves.
As I try to decipher the labyrinth of freedom I find myself in, I am drawn again to The Freedom to Learn Manifesto, an articulation of a set of principles allowing learners a greater set of freedom and autonomy. It’s a living study in how a freer and more democratic education system could lead to a more socially and ecologically just world. It is divided into two sets, positive and negative freedoms. The freedom to create, freedom to be, freedom to think, freedom to become, freedom to be accepted. And on the other side of these, the freedom from emphasis on high stakes testing, the freedom from coercive disciplinary systems, the freedom from rigid bureaucratic rules, the freedom from constant comparison and competition, the freedom from narrow interpretations of success.
The unexpected freedom from the structures of schooling may just have liberated us, for a moment, to explore what learning might be like navigating these new spaces. It is not ideal, as we are separated from each other and the world around us. But it’s a new playing field. Some families are trying it at home, many schools have also recognised this opportunity for trust. Phoenix Education has put together a toolkit for schools which want to support staff, parents and students to navigate these new freedoms, while they can. Where do we go from here? Where might we find ourselves? What is our own balance between obligation and desire? Can we find more sweet moments where they overlap?
When everything goes back to normal, we’ll have our freedom of movement and congregation back (hopefully, we might need to fight for them), we’ll be able to gather in groups of more than two. In some ways, we’ll be free again. But maybe let’s not cement over the cracks just yet, and see what wild flowers grow.
