Letters from Abroad

Breaking Free and Being Mentally Elsewhere

Centering yourself is an active choice

Walking away from ourselves (Credit: Dall-E 2)

Over the past two years, I’ve been exchanging letters with a friend of mine living in Scotland. He’s a writer, I’m a writer, and we’ve been sharing ideas of how to best lead a worthwhile life in the face of a world that says: no.

One idea that stuck out to me in our recent correspondence was that of finding freedom. Creative, nontraditional lives are difficult to manifest, so it’s on us to not just find, but create our own freedom from the constraints that limit our ambitions.

Here’s what I mean.

Freedom From

Freedom is a word that we use almost exclusively in a political sense. I suppose I mean something semi-political here, but not really. I mean freedom in a less charged and more complete sense.

Simply: the freedom to be yourself. Freedom from, freedom to. Being.

I’ve been tugging on a related thread with folks… we’ve been tugging on this idea of ‘freedom.’ Not in the political, righteous sense… More this: dancing on a Saturday night, it’s two a.m. and you are not aware of this fact; you just want to keep going at the dancing, and when that subsides, you will step outside, smoke something, the substance doesn’t…