I am not separate from you. I know myself only by being with you.
You may be single or married, widowed or divorced. You may be young, middle-aged, or elderly. You may be cheerful or morose.
None of that matters.
We are the same. We are part of the same genetic material, the RNA/DNA stuff of life, the only species who we think can create offspring together.
Let others say what they want. Let them shout on the street, protest elections, act in ways contrary to you, create petitions, march toward the government headquarters, do whatever motivates them to socialize with one another.
We are them and yet we are not them. We get so wrapped up in our binocular view of life, seeing things as personal to ourselves, especially here in front of words or watching video images when we block out everything around us, that we forget the view of Earth from space. We act like animals in a cage sometimes, the bars and locks invisible to us because we've been down here so long, wanting to be free.
Free? From what? To where do we escape? Where is freedom? Are we not already free to do what we want?
Most of us live our caged lives in absolute freedom. There are no locks on the door and the bars can be bent apart with two fingers.
Freedom starts with us. You and I must be free in here, in our thoughts and actions toward one another, before we can find freedom in the rest of the physical world. We must overcome fear, put aside material desires, and open up ourselves to seeing no barriers that would prevent any and all possibilities with each other.
As they say (and I wish I had a handy quote to give you...wait, I have The Yale Book of Quotations, so here's what "they" say):
"We must love one another or die." W.H. Auden
"In Czechoslovakia there is no such thing as freedom of the press. In the United States there is no such thing as freedom from the press." Martina Navratilova
I am not a fully free man. You can see that in my eyes and hear it in my voice. I maintain the artificial barriers of my subculture, which I can say saddens me but knowing is doing, is it not? It is not.
Freedom, true freedom, involves risk and responsibility. Risk of one's life and responsibility for others' lives. Some see freedom as irrational behaviour and carry on in that fashion, pretending their lives are more important than others by accumulating wealth they cannot use, disobeying traffic signals because they think they have more important things to do than others (or for the simple pleasure of civil disobedience), and putting other people's lives at risk to protect their own. I have participated in some of those behaviours so I can say with honesty that humans are not always rational but to me there's a difference between instantaneous, unplanned irrationality and a life based on risking others' lives or livelihoods for your protection and enjoyment.
Freedom is seeing me in every one of you, all the time.
We are primates with so-called higher brain functionality but still connected to our genetic past through hormones and other body fluids/functions we share with our planetary neighbors. Thus, every one of us is born to experience ourselves as we are, including our desire to reproduce and our desire to build spaceships.
We are the same. We want to live. We want to feel free.
If I can ever break down the barriers and stand in front of you as free human in all the sense of the phrase, then let freedom mean free, free from being free and free from being a human. Otherwise, I'm still just this primate, jumping up and down in his cage when I see other primates jumping up and down in their cages, all of us pretending to be free because we can move from one cage to another in this laboratory we call Earth.
Never mistake another person's action as better than your own just because that person has received media attention. Standing in front of the mirror and brushing your teeth or sitting at your computer and drinking a cup of coffee can add more to your sense of freedom than another person crossing the street to buy a pack of cigarettes and getting swept up in a crowd going to a large gathering to protest recent election results. Don't believe what you see. Believe who you are. I believe in you because I am only me through you, all of you, including the ones who blog or tweet the little details of your lives that never make it on the broadcasted news. Freedom is not being rich and famous (in fact, becoming rich and/or famous entails giving up many physical freedoms). Freedom is being you and letting others be themselves through you.
Yours always,
Me
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