Flip Flop Weather

Today I walked to the laundromat in my flip-flops. No scarf, no hat. The clouds disapproved, and the wind made sure I noticed it. But there was just enough sun to justify my bare feet, and my toes rejoiced for one more experience of freedom before December snaps shut around them and they hibernate for three months.

Resolutions

Two complementary ideas in my New Year's resolution(s): trust and fear. This semester was a season of being forced to acknowledge my insecurities, one by one. They popped out of corners and slid out of shadows. They nosed me from behind, like shy dogs; they crashed against my windows. And this semester was a season of finding myself held, soothed, brought inside.

Big changes are coming in 2011, in my external life. In my internal life, I want to see big changes, too. Having realized I am so dominated by fear (fear that floods over me, fear that drenches me, fear that knocks the air from my lungs), I have begun to want freedom from fear. I want to lie in the sun of security, and finally dry off, out of the reach of the waves. I don't want tidal waves of fear happening at the drop of a word, at the twist of a smile. I want to live in love, not fear: "Perfect love casts out fear. She who fears is not made perfect in love." I want to trust, instead. I want to trust O. more, trust my fellowship more, trust my friends more. I want to trust God more.

Freedom from fear, freedom to trust. For 2011, I resolve to graduate out of fear into the liberty of love.

Morning After

I am not getting dressed today. I've been awake for three hours, but the day still hasn't convinced me that time is moving onward. I did take off the giant t-shirt and old shorts I sleep in, hours ago. But I couldn't bring myself to put on the constraining uniform of stitched fabric and seams that opens the door into the external world. I can't stand the wires and zippers today. Denim would be a straightjacket to me today. Even a t-shirt has too much shape.

Instead, I am wrapped in a sarong, folds that drape around me and a knot at my shoulder. A few tugs and the whole thing will dissolve into a pool of green on the floor. I can escape any time I want. To get out of a shirt or pants, I would have to remove myself from their shapes: squirm and pull and duck my head and bend my elbows, step out of the pant legs, ease the waistband past my hip bones. The clothes, thrown to the floor, pile up, as though they are trying to stand on their own, manikin-like. Oh, they definitely have their own agenda. They want me to fit into them, to fill them out, to be the right proportions, to distribute myself into the right places.

The sarong, though, moves around me. It is content to become the garment I want. If I ask it, it will be a simple blanket. It would be glad to be a curtain for me, it would be honored to be a veil for me, or even a shroud, if it came to that. The sarong conforms to what I already am, and if I want freedom, it will unfurl from around me and fall away--

and I will stand alone and bare--

my hair falling down my back, uncombed--

I wish I had wild curls like a waterfall, not this clean, straight flow of hair like a smooth river. I am wishing, today, for hair that tumbles and quarrels and can't make up its mind, hair that fights itself and refuses to be untangled, hair that shapes itself and becomes a sculpture.

I am a mess. Hair is sprouting from my legs, like the first grass growing in the spring. My armpits aren't clean and bare like a marble floor, but fertile like a stone grown mossy by the river. I am a meadow of weeds and wildflowers, not a garden with paths and flowerbeds.

Rain, fall on me. Sun, let me drink you in. This is where I am right now--sitting aside for the moment, just being what I feel. Just being.

Remembering: I am alive.

Dominique on Freedom

I've been reading Ayn Rand's The Fountainhead, which is a lot more absorbing than I expected. It goes by much faster than Crime and Punishment, anyway, perhaps because Crime and Punishment doesn't really offer you anyone to sympathize with, only a horrified fascination with the main character's sickened mind... The Fountainhead, on the other hand, has Howard Roark, "the ideal man," if I interpret the author's introduction correctly, with whom it is hard to empathize but easy to sympathize--or easy to admire, at least. He is an architect who lives with absolute conviction and uncompromising ideals. Those ideals deal primarily with architecture and aesthetics, though, and I can't easily connect them with my own thoughts.

But I heard my own musings echoed in the voice of Dominique. Her father, a rich man, breathes and soaks in society's ideas as a fish gulps down the water that surrounds it and fills its gills. But Dominique herself lives cut off from society. Her isolation is not physical or social, but emotional. Every man falls in love with her impervious beauty, but no touch can penetrate her cold command of herself. She refuses to be affected by anything, because she values her freedom above everything else. To love anything, even to want anything, is to become vulnerable. Dependent. So she cuts her heart out of the world. She explains to her uncomprehending friend Alvah,

If I found a job, a project, an idea or a person I wanted--I'd have to depend on the whole world. Everything has strings leading to everything else. We're all tied together. We're all in a net, the net is waiting, and we're pushed into it by one single desire. You want a thing and it's precious to you. Do you know who is standing ready to tear it out of your hands? You can't know, it may be so involved and so far away, but someone is ready and you're afraid of them all. And you cringe and you crawl and you beg and you accept them--just so they'll let you keep it. (143-144)

Cynical? Sure. I disagree completely with Dominique's choice of how to deal with the dilemma, but I agree with her analysis of how humans tend to work. She has caught the central insight that we hate: everything affects everything else. If you care about anything, you can't be perfectly free. The only way to approximate independence is to eliminate desire, to seek the nirvana of a desolate emptiness. With these priorities, as Dominique sees, the only option is to demand either perfection,

--or nothing. So, you see, I take the nothing. [...] I take the only desire one can really permit oneself. Freedom, Alvah, freedom. (144)

Alvah, naturally, questions the nature of such a freedom. But Dominique knows and admits, it is a freedom "To ask nothing. To expect nothing. To depend on nothing."

It is a miserable freedom. A miserly freedom. You guard your heart and soul. You never give anyone the power to hurt you. But the way you render your heart invulnerable is to kill it yourself. You never expect joy, so you can never be disappointed when it never comes to you. You keep every pain and pleasure locked up inside. You keep yourself to yourself.

Actual freedom comes from giving yourself away. The freedom that sets your heart free is acceptance of the fact that you'll get hurt, and trust that things will still be all right.

It's easier to ignore all the causal links and pretend you're independent without actually imprisoning yourself in a quest for freedom from pain, than to admit that you're actually vulnerable, not in control of your fate. It's easier to care for nothing, than to allow yourself to care, knowing you'll get hurt. It's easier to live in impermeable despair than in fragile hope.

I am trying not to take an easier route.

[p.s. No idea how Ayn Rand is going to judge Dominique, in the end. 500 pages can hold a lot of plot.]

Wonderland

"I give myself very good advice, but I very seldom follow it," laments Alice in Disney's rendition of Lewis Carroll's classic, as the bizarre creatures around the meadow peer at her from the shadows. Alice is a bit of a nitwit, so I'm reluctant to admit similarity to her. However: I give my peers very good insights, but I very seldom believe them in my heart.

By which I mean, when the hopeful things I tell people are real actually do manifest themselves, I am surprised. I was actually right? (I think to myself.) Oh yeah, there's a reason I believe that--which is that it's true! It's true whether or not I feel it, whether or not I believe it.

Reality is not contingent on my moods.

Reality is not contingent on my choices, either. Yes, I am responsible for my own actions, and by acting rightly, I improve my life--but if I fail to act correctly, sometimes things can still work out. Sometimes good things fall out of the sky, without my earning them. Sometimes there is unexpected mercy. Sometimes I don't know how to fix a problem, or even what the problem really is, but then it fixes itself. For instance, today: you surpassed my wildest expectations. Maybe you don't understand me completely, but you understand enough, and you're doing what you can. Freedom is a beautiful birthday gift. Thank you. (Thank God.)

God is good: all the time. All the time: God is good.

Free Will vs. Determinism

[Mostly just writing this here so I don't lose track of the thought. But I'd love comments.]

According to Christianity, God is sovereign, i.e., controls all things. He is omniscient and has an all-encompassing plan which is guaranteed to come to pass. Thus, everything has been predetermined--or, to use the theological-sounding term, preordained.

Meanwhile, Christianity also claims that humans have free will (at the very least in the sense that they deserve to be held accountable for their actions, i.e., the choices a person makes over the course of their finite life here determine their eternal fate). Their choices are real, and they matter. Humans are agents. However, God's control of everything has to also include control of the fate/choices of each of these supposed free agents. How do we resolve this paradox?

A pertinent idea is that because God created the universe, He exists outside of it (though of course another central idea in Christianity is that He interacts with the universe and intervenes in its events). Humans, meanwhile, exist and act within the system of the universe. So when we speak of human actions, we are talking on a different level than when we speak of God's actions. The frame of reference is different.

From these premises, here is one way to consider human free will and divine sovereignty compatible: We can say that from outside the system (i.e., on the level of God's actions), everything within the system is deterministic because God set up the system, has a plan, and cannot be thwarted. With respect to God's will, everything within the universe is fixed. But at the same time, we can say that from inside the system (i.e., on the level of human actions), humans are agents, and their choices count as free because their choices are free within the universe--free if you don't look outside the system to God's plan. When they make choices, they don't know at the time which way God has predetermined things will go.

In sum, this interpretation says that subjectively, or relatively, we have free will. But absolutely, when we compare ourselves to God, we don't really.

(Note: A major source of confusion is that God operates on many levels. I only distinguished here between within the universe and outside the universe, but I'm sure there are many more levels at which God exists, since He is incomprehensibly and indescribably great.)

The more I think about this, the less sure I feel that this is a theologically sound interpretation. If our free will is really relative, how can we say that it is free in the first place? What if we try to resolve the paradox by saying that God has the power to control our every choice, but doesn't actually use it? But then again, given the premise God's plan is ineffable, undeniable, irrefutable, invincible, etc., all things ultimately have a predetermined outcome, so our free choices, even if they exist on an absolute level somehow, can't change the final course of events, in which case they can't have been absolutely free anyway...

Thoughts?

Freedom, To and From

I have trouble describing freedom in positive terms. When I think of "freedom", what comes to mind is freedom -from- something. If I am free from something, that thing is not a presence in my life. For example, I could be free from homework, which would mean not having any homework. Less trivially, I could be free from fear: there would be no fear in my life. But the idea behind freedom from X is not having any requirements or obligations with regard to that X. Trivially again, I could be free with regard to my homework, which means not being required to do that homework, or perhaps that the consequences of doing or not doing the homework do not matter. Or in terms of fear, being free from fear really is about not being burdened or oppressed by fear: being unaffected by fear.

So what would complete freedom look like? Complete freedom could mean freedom from everything (complete in terms of breadth), or a somehow more intense freedom (complete in terms of depth), or maybe both. Freedom from everything could mean -lacking- everything, according to the initial definition. This would mean a completely empty life: no possessions, no emotions, no achievements, etc. Clearly, this is not the idea we are looking for. Under my modified definition of freedom, freedom from everything would mean being unconstrained by everything, not obligated to anything. I think this would mean being unaffected by everything, however. (AGREE/DISAGREE??)

To my mind, being that detached from everything would be sad and boring, though, because if you don't care about anything at all, then there can be neither pleasure nor pain nor purpose in your life. The idea of detachment does have a sort of aesthetic appeal, though. Sometimes it seems like it would be worth giving up pleasure in order to be free from pain. My impression is that this is part of the Buddhist ideal: desire causes suffering, so you should endeavor to free yourself from having desires. Most of the time, though, I feel like that variety of freedom/detachment/distance would lead to a colorless, sterile experience of life, rather than a rich and exciting experience, and that the trade would be a bad one.

What about freedom that is complete in depth? Contrasting "deep" freedom with "wide" freedom implies that wide freedom would, in fact, be shallower, and deep freedom would be narrower, i.e., would exclude some types of freedom. Under this idea, you could be free in a complete manner but not be free from everything. I think the premise here would have to be that some types of freedom are desirable and others aren't, and that deep freedom would mean you were free only in the desirable ways. Alternately, we could say that only some types of freedom are "real" or "true," and that deep freedom would mean having all the true freedoms, but not the false freedoms. This is effectively the same as the previous premise (assuming that truth and reality are desirable). In any case, deep freedom would not have as large a set of freedoms as wide freedom.

To make up for having a smaller set of freedoms, each element in the set would have be somehow larger, if deep freedom is to have the same "magnitude" as wide freedom (i.e., also be complete). I have to admit, I'm not sure what exactly that would look like, or at any rate, how to go about describing this depth/largeness/greatness of freedom. (IDEAS?)

Perhaps my initial comments about freedom as an absence vs. as a lack of obligation apply here. Being free from homework in a shallow way would mean having no homework. Being free from homework in a deep way would mean having an unforced choice about how to interact with the homework. Maybe the professor said that this homework is optional, or maybe because you did all the previous homework assignments, your choice of whether to do this homework or not will have no impact on your grade. But maybe an even deeper variety of freedom from homework would mean that even though your choice about the homework does affect your grade in the class, your GPA, your learning, your reputation, etc., and even though you recognize all those ramifications of your choice, those are not the constraints that determine your choice. You are free with regard to the homework because your choice about the homework happens on a higher level than the homework itself. You make a choice based on some overarching principle, or some higher set up priorities. By higher, I mean less situation-specific, more general, more abstract. Bigger-picture. (That is a rather vague and formless definition. BETTER DEFINITION?) For instance, I could choose to do the homework because I believe it will enrich my mind rather than because it will get me a better grade on the test. (I might be mixing levels here, though... Please comment/correct if you think I am.)

This might work better with the example of fear. Let's go with fear of political persecution for holding some belief. You could be free from this fear on a shallow level: political persecution for that belief simply doesn't happen in the environment you exist in. (Hmm, perhaps shallow is not a good word here after all. SUGGESTIONS?) This is a fear that just isn't present in your life, so you are free from it.

But let's say you do live in an environment such that this persecution is a real fact of life. What would it mean to be free from this fear in that circumstance? The deeper freedom would be to be aware of the consequences of your belief and of the reality of the persecution--i.e., still be affected by the fear/persecution--but nonetheless to live without fear because you take your security and identity from a source that the political persecution and all its consequences cannot touch.

I think that at this point, at this depth of freedom, the question changes from "free from what?" to "free to what?" or even "free for what?" The answer: you are free for whatever higher cause guides your life and sets you free from this particular thing (and potentially from all other oppressions, if the cause is high enough). You are free to pursue that cause and that purpose. And here is a positively defined freedom! Freedom is the ability to pursue the ideal or cause or purpose that you believe in. Freedom is the ability to enjoy that ideal or cause or purpose once you attain it (if that is possible).

With this variety of freedom, you can respond to all sorts of events, but they do not shake you. You can choose how to be affected, because everything is evaluated relative to your higher framework.

I think this is the kind of freedom the Psalmist means when he says, "I run in the path of your commands, for you have set my heart free," and the kind of freedom Paul means when he writes, "It was for freedom that Christ has set us free," and the kind of freedom that is behind the jubilant exclamation, "Free at last, free at last, thank God Almighty, I'm free at last."

Freedom and Law

We usually think of law as something that constrains us. In particular, Christians tend to consider God's law (as given in the Old Testament) a burden, in that it is a standard we can never succeed in fully attaining by our own effort. The law feels like a cause for fear, a prison of rules and regulations, a list of barriers that must be surmounted.

But in Psalm 119, the law is something else entirely. I especially liked verse 32: "I run in the path of your commands, for you have set my heart free." Here, the law is a path cleared for us through the wilderness of the world, which sets us free from the struggle to move forward and find direction. Moreover, "the path of your commands" is one we can run on. What kind of path would someone run on? Not on a path with traps set in it; not on a badly marked path, or a dark path; not on a path toward doom; not on a path with no known destination. You run with a light heart when you know where you're going and how to get there, and you want to get there. To the psalmist, the law is direction and guidance, and freedom. In following God's law--in running on God's law--he finds his heart free. . .

I would like to have a free heart.

Looking elsewhere in Psalm 119, the law is something that wards off shame (6, 46), that leads us to God himself (10), that is worth more than money (14, 72), that shows God's love (64), that gives delight (24), makes us sing (54), grants comfort (52), gives hope (43, 47, 74), strengthens (28). . . These are all such good things--not just in the sense of "morally edifying", but genuinely desirable. Freedom, joy, delight, comfort: not judgment and condemnation.

"Open my eyes that I may see wonderful things in your law." (v. 18) This is how I want to look at the law--not as a duty but as a gift and privilege.

Unbound

Disclaimer: The following may not be coherent, due to the extreme excess of phlegm in the author at the time of writing. Said phlegm is concentrated in her throat and (it feels like) lungs, despite the large quantities of it that have been expelled and now reside in trashcans scattered across campus, entombed in the thinnest of white paper.

Americans talk about "freedom" and "liberty" a great deal. Some of them think that America is the only free nation, or some such semi-delusion. Others complain about how oppressed Americans are because of the evil government, which view, while it has its basis (*coughphlegmBushPatriotActcough*), is also singularly lacking in perspective, considering how much worse things could be. I'm sure you can all think of the most obvious reference; there are also good ones from the nation's own history. Think various racist policies, and the Communist scare post-WWII. (My APUSH knowledge has largely deserted me--can't remember the name of the guy and the trials... not motivated enough to look it up right now...) I'd say that by and large modern inhabitants of the United States have it really, really good on the freedom front.

That freedom is, of course, of the legislatable kind. Significant though that subset of freedom is, it leaves out a more personal variety. I'm not sure just how to qualify it, but I guess what I'm getting at is social freedom, or perhaps interpersonal freedom. Freedom to do what you want or think is right, or whatever means by which you decide--freedom to choose, rather, for that is the essence of freedom--without the constraints of worrying what others will think or feel. Being a real individual! That's the "American" ideal, right?

I think people don't normally realize that having that degree of freedom entails being completely unconnected with other humans. It's not just the clingy or manipulative relationships that affect our perspective/ideas/choices/priorities: it's every relationship. Whenever we care about someone, whenever we feel duty or love or responsibility (which are awfully intertangled), we make choices based on that. . .

Talk about "bonding" isn't purely metaphorical. Caring about someone is a bond, is binding, is putting bounds on your life.

You cannot be completely free without being completely friendless. Freedom comes at a high, high price: I couldn't pay it, even if I wanted to; I'm not sure any human is capable of purchasing such a degree of freedom. Sometimes it seems like it would be easier to be free / carefree, instead of caring so much. But really, I think the dichotomy is less slave--free than happy--free. Well, those are false dichotomies, because some degree of freedom is vital. But still. I would rather be bound.