Freedom is as freedom does

Today I went out to get lunch. As in, I walked to my car in deliciously thawing 45 degree weather, drove down the Jamaicaway with my window cracked, and got some soup. An escalating movie theme from Hans Zimmer came on my shuffle and I felt my spirits lift, unconfined by my desk, by my computer, by the gross wintry weather that keeps making encore after encore. In a small way, I felt a little burst of freedom.

That word… ugh. I actually loathe that word for its overuse. Like sorry. Or (in some contexts) love. I keep hearing Fezzik telling Vizzini that he does not think the word means what he thinks it means. But, I suppose, freedom – like love, like beauty – is relative to the person that feels it.

But beauty can easily be manufactured. Or a thin illusion beneath proper lighting and layers of dusty paint. I’m starting to think freedom is suffering the same delusional makeover.

The happy rhythm of my brief excursion today was interrupted by an annoying merge of traffic because a Public Works truck was parked on the side of one lane… filling in a huge pothole. I was annoyed at the disruption, but then I thought, well, gee that would have really sucked if my liberating moment hit that hole in the ground and gave Kermit yet another bruise, or worse yet, crippled him. And better it happened at this time of day than the evening when the merge scenario would have stalled my sense of freedom with the quiet cut of my hybrid engine at a standstill in traffic.

I can’t tell anyone what it means to be free. I don’t want anyone telling me that being able to conceal a weapon makes me a liberated woman all while they insist that a fetus in my body has more of a right to live than me if there is a complicated pregnancy. That my right to eat a sugar cookie in a school is more precious than my right to demand a decent wage for teaching the kids jacked up on those empty calories. That my hard earned wages must stay in my own bank account so I can drive over gaps in the road and then pay ten times as much to replace the suspension. 

Freedom sometimes is that gleeful sense of twenty minutes away from the repetition of normal life. But more often it is simply a choice between two difficult things. It is the ability to say, yes, this is unpleasant but better to pay a little sacrifice now than to suffer the bigger consequence down the road. And having the freedom to make the choice to make that road a little less full of holes.