real freedom

When Watashi-wa was living in America, I was often blown away by the vast range of products in supermarkets. Entire aisles of washing up liquid! So many brands, so many colours, scents, sizes. So much choice! 

But also, so stressful! This one is a bit cheaper, that one is smaller but claims to do more dishes, this one is more environmentally friendly, but I prefer that colour... It often took me a long time to decide, and in fact it made me quite neurotic. I used to long for a crappy London corner shop with just one of each product. There would be no need to give it a second thought.

Similarly, in life we pursue wealth and success because they will give us more options, and we mistake that breadth of options for freedom. And on one level, there is freedom: freedom from poverty, freedom from necessity, freedom from the daily grind. However, there is also plenty of opportunity for neurosis, as many privileged people have demonstrated, Watashi-wa included.

But more significantly, the freedom itself is a superficial one. We may gain freedom from some external conditions, but we are still slaves to our desires. The more opportunity we have for indulging our desires, the more demanding those desires become. We spend our lives trying to satisfy them, and always feeling that we haven't quite got there, that greater satisfaction lies just around the corner.

Real freedom comes from surrendering our will so that we are no longer the slaves of our desires. There are many ways of doing that. For some people, the demands of being a  parent force them to relinquish their own desires, to a large extent. Committing wholeheartedly to a cause may also have that effect: an individual's will is subsumed in the collective. The monks on Mt. Athos surrender their will by committing to total obedience to an elder. Or maybe you can go directly to the Boss of Bosses and commit to doing his will - in so far as you can discern it - rather than your own. And you hope that, more and more, the two align.

What is interesting is that being deprived of your freedom is, quite literally, prison. But voluntarily giving up your freedom is, for many people, paradise.