Freedom

Freedom

There are times when all ahead feels only dark. When the world speaks of limits before possibilities, when the people around you are more certain of failure than of the future, when the words nothing will change keep arriving on repeat. No one is entirely free in such an environment. Humans take in the world by seeing, hearing, touching, smelling, tasting. Much of what we call reality is built from which environment we are placed in and what we see and hear over and over.

So there is no need to deny that people are shaped by their environment. It should be admitted. Stay long in a dark place and the world looks dark; keep hearing only pessimism and failure comes to mind before possibility. That is how humans are built.

But that is not where everything ends.

The eyes can move.

This fact looks small, but it matters. Even in the same place, what you look at is, to some degree, a choice. Shift your gaze and the information coming in changes; when the information changes, the range of possibilities you can think changes too. Even if you can't change the world at once, you can start by changing the direction you face.

If circumstances allow a little more, you can move your two legs. You can leave the place that keeps breaking you and go elsewhere, meet new people, find a different environment. And if you can move your two hands, far more becomes possible. You can build, fix, learn, record, and connect — intervening in the very environment you live in.

Environment makes the person. But the person also makes the environment.

The world is not handed to us in one direction. Environment shapes sensation, sensation shapes perception, perception shapes action — but human action changes the environment in return. And the changed environment creates new sensation and new perception again.

So freedom is not a state released from every constraint.

Freedom is the fact that, even within constraints, you can still move.

That the eyes can move. That the two legs can move. That the two hands can move. And that through those movements, you can gradually change the information you take in and the environment you live in.

Pessimism is dangerous not simply because it sours the mood. Pessimism makes a person believe that moving is useless. Lies make a person believe no other possibility exists. The moment someone accepts that as fact, exploration stops, action shrinks, and the environment really does stop changing. That is how pessimism makes itself come true.

So the darker it is ahead, the more you must move.

This is not a demand to force yourself to believe the world is bright. If it is dark, admit that it is dark — but do not believe the darkness is all there is. Move your eyes to check whether what you see now is everything; move your two legs to see what exists elsewhere; and if there is nothing there, move your two hands to build it yourself.

The reason to live, too, may not be something someone hands you as a finished sentence. It may be something discovered in the process of moving, seeing, meeting, making, failing, and moving again.

The world enters me.

But I, too, enter the world.

And the small space of movement that remains between the two.

I call that freedom.