The Evolution of My Freedom

In October 2015 I left my job as an executive with an engineering firm where I had worked for 25 years, got on my boat, sailed out through San Francisco’s Golden Gate and turned left to begin a two year sailing voyage. All at once, I left a life that was highly structured and in which I had a known and powerful identity, to begin one that had virtually no structure and where I was a nobody.

By working hard and smart, saving my money and being content with living a relatively frugal life, I was financially independent.  I didn’t have to work anymore. I was free. Free to go sailing. Free to do pretty much whatever I pleased.

I thought being free like this would be great. I could sail my boat for a couple of years, while contemplating all the things I could do next, with beautiful nature all around me for inspiration.

My freedom turned out not to be so great.

Lacking the structure and identity of my past, I felt adrift, lost. The infinite number of things I could choose to do felt overwhelming. The choices I made often turned out not to be free but to come with costs of conflict, fear, or unintended consequences.

A friend shared a cartoon with me, I don’t know it’s source. It is darkly humorous, but poignantly captures my own struggle with freedom, albeit a bit over the top. Here are the cartoon’s captions:

Life is infinite. It can’t be escaped.

Freedom is despair.

Every choice you make closes off every other possible choice you could have lived.

You are trapped in a single brief moment, filled with an inescapable longing for the infinite lives that are not to be.

Regret is the core of human freedom.

Every choice you make will lead to it.

Every choice you don’t make will lead to it.

And yet we are forced to choose.

Forced to nourish our despair through a freedom we can’t escape, the anguish of our regrets is what makes us human.

Yes, dark and over the top. But it captures the essence of why freedom didn’t feel as great as I thought it would.

I came to realize that I was not ready for freedom to the extent I was experiencing it. A lifetime of defined roles of student, worker, parent, boss and the constraints of having to earn a living and raise and support children left me unprepared for abundance. My awareness was limited, my identity founded mostly on my personal, thinking self. I intellectually equated freedom with the privilege of having lots of choices available, but had no concept of what freedom is within one’s being and what to do with it.

Being at such odds with freedom was a painful time for me. I often reacted to that pain by behaving badly towards those I love, finding it easier to blame them for my suffering than look inside myself to find its cause. Behaving like that, together with feeling uncertain and confused, led to self-loathing and depression.  Freedom was despair.

My study and practice of engineering, competency in management and finance, charisma and skills of persuasion didn’t point to a means of escape from my despair, other than going back to work and regaining the structure and identity I had before. For me that would be stepping backwards, giving up, and forgoing the opportunity to learn and grow. So, I started looking for other ideas and guidance.

I started with reading books on psychology, which pointed me towards the practice of mindfulness and meditation. I began to understand and experience the therapeutic nature of yoga’s mind-body connection. Mindfulness, meditation and yoga led me to philosophical and spiritual teachings. As I learned about them, the interconnectedness of these subjects and practices amazed me. I encountered common threads and ideas between sources that span thousands of years, originate from vastly different cultures, and are presented from scientific, mystical and pragmatic perspectives. The most important thread I discovered is the difference between the consciousness of the thinking self, the self that remembers and imagines, and the consciousness of the being self, the self that experiences.

I continue to read, meditate and practice yoga. I pay attention to the counsel offered by friends wiser than I in these matters. I joined a men’s group where I witness and support other men’s’ struggles and in doing so, receive support.  I am learning and growing.

I am beginning to feel more comfortable and grounded with my freedom and in living with little structure and identity. My comfort arises from a deeper and expanded awareness of self and my connection to others. I find myself at my best when I am living my experiencing self, here and now, in the present. I allow my thinking self to do the things it needs to do but try not to let it define or dominate my identity.

A new understanding of freedom is emerging for me, a composite concept drawn from multiple sources and my own contemplation. It is still young and forming, but I now see and experience freedom as this:

Freedom is being without the restraints of personal identity, experiencing life as it really is, as who you really are. Freedom is giving up trying to control, instead sitting still, listening and patiently waiting for the next step to reveal itself, trusting that all will unfold just as it should.

Or, as spiritual teacher Jon Bernie sums up more simply and concisely, “Any moment in which you are fully here without wanting “here” to be somewhere else, you are free.”

My, what a different concept than I had when I set out on my voyage, where I saw freedom as simply the privilege of having an abundance of choices available, a concept that can only lead to longing and regrets.

I still suffer from longing. I still feel the anguish of my regrets. But I am awakening to awareness, spending more time just being and, as I do this, feeling truly free. I still have an infinite number of things I could do next, but I’m avoiding letting my mind lead me into the trap of choosing one over the other before I’m ready and at the expense of what I am experiencing now.

Real freedom is available to us all.  It always has been. It always will.