Freedom isn’t free.
This reality came to me so long ago.
I recall marching into our high school cafeteria, in cheer uniform to the socks and shoes, to confront my cheer mate about something she had mentioned in a letter she wrote to her boyfriend, by luck, my good friend, who let me read the letter.
I spaced out of anything else she wrote. The part I recall reading slowly but surely was, “Anne’s life isn’t all peaches and cream.”
I know now that she had hit a trigger for me.
I didn’t march in that cafeteria to verbally confront her in front of our peers because I felt she had wronged me.
She had found me.
The part I thought with two jobs after school and all my academic and leadership activities at school I hid so well.
You have to lose something to gain something, I only see now as the catch to the yin and yang, tit for tat, this or that for balance.
At school, I was freed from hunger for drama, instability, and lack of progress. In high school, I could finally work closer to become and continue to be without the fears of the What if you don’t make it?surrounding me.
When I marched into that cafeteria, although I recall asking my cheer mate, who had now found herself fumbling to find words I wouldn’t allow to interrupt my streaming rage, What she meant by those words? , what anyone in the cafeteria should have said to help me chill was, “Let her answer.”
If she had even managed to interject any explanation, I’m sure any or all of it were reasonable.
Her truth was just too costly for my heart, my mind, my body, and my spirit to risk exposing anything even remotely close to any of my truth.
Inside, I started to wonder what she knew, recalling that in our circle during cheer camp, while others poured out their truths from cancer to divorces to absent fathers, I was the one to create the dissatisfied and disappointed looks by telling the rest, “Nooe. I have nothing to share.”
Co-captain spoke her truth. She had nothing to share.
It was and is no surprise to me now, why reading my cheer mates’ written words had caused me to immediately react.
When I thought to be free at school, something told others, perhaps, I wasn’t.
I hold no emotion until I do. Clearly.
At school, I was free to talk or not talk. At home, there was hardly my turn amongst the happenings of my older siblings.
Training days of seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, and feeling.
I could absorb, inhaled in what I decisively collected as what I wanted to be my truth; exhaled whatever I didn’t want to store.
I guarded my truth.
I have guarded my truth.
I guard my truth for so long.
Interestingly, as time has gifted me, truth itself expands and constricts like lungs from within each breath-full moment.
I am grateful for having watched and listened as my parents’ minds interacted and engaged before me.
Funny how I don’t recall having feelings of fear that all would fall apart or be destroyed upon words when it came to my parents.
Somehow I felt they wouldn’t give up on each other because I think they knew they couldn’t for those around them falling apart.
I grew up in a loud home, everyone loud, including me at times trying to tune out the noise around me like when I danced in my room by myself to music or loudly humming to myself with my index fingers in each ear in the hospital bathroom to (unsuccessfully) tune out the flat-lining sound of my brother’s signed off life support as all siblings and my parents wailed their farewell sorrows.
Ridiculous imprisonment for a child. No wonder why that “peaches and cream” hit a nerve. By senior year, I thought I had been freed from my own truths.
We each have come up from somewhere, somehow, some time.
We each hold our own truths.
There are just those of us convinced that acting like victims never helped anyone.
Victims all around is suffocating to anyone who wants to win in life. There are those who say they want to win but then, think, by surrounding themselves with those who aren’t winning, their pedestal is just a little higher than the rest.
How is this winning or victorious?
Pity parties that never end with those loving them so much, they keep creating more to keep the party going.
Imprisonment is free, in this case. Not freedom.
It was Papa and Mama’s debates that kept my mind to feel free to have progress at least in my own inhalation and exhalation of perspectives from two people who I valued.
While they may have felt these moments to be loveless, I actually saw their passionate desire for each to be heard.
It was these moments that in my thoughts, I felt to take advantage of any lesson I would be receiving.
My mind could free itself for a moment of my own quiet frustrations of what I couldn’t control to just listening to my parents exchanging their own truths.
While still guarding mine, I could listen to theirs, inhaling and exhaling what I wanted to let in or shut away.
So, there I would be, sitting or at times, passing a room back and forth, while listening keenly to my parents’ endless debates about love, life, and liberty.
They debated until sometimes, one left the room. I honestly believe this is how they kept their relationship going to the time of Papa’s passing. There came even a point where even when I was already married with children, Papa called me with his familiar debating voice.
I knew what would come and I was ready.
Both continued another argumentative debate over the phone, each taking turn to get on the phone to tell me their perspective.
Funny and so precious to my memory. I see now that perhaps both missed having me in their presence as I realize I missed being there.
They felt safe with me. They knew I wouldn’t take sides. I just loved to inhale and exhale their viewpoints on whatever was on their platter to discuss.
No one should ever be afraid to speak their truths.
I have enjoyed the freedom to speak and be heard since I can remember.
To think out loud without judgment.
While our body must inhale and exhale to breathe, I believe the heart, mind, and spirit seek the same.
How else do we love?
How else do we feel?
How else do we just know to be becoming?
We exhale the old knowledge of what we’ve gathered and let it sit in the air to commingle with all the old of others.
We inhale what we want and choose to take in, whether it be some of the old parts of us but whilst also, in hunger to be satiated with more knowledge and truth, other parts of others.
This is how we exchange parts of ourselves with parts of all those around us.
While I still need to gather my reflection on my collective thoughts on the book, Nexus, I share an understanding of the need to connect for truth.
One’s truth today may strongly be that very essence of guarantee. And, then, in breathing in and out, as we exchange our truth with others, the truth that was clear becomes clearer.
Yes?
It’s like me thinking there were only pyramids to exist in Egypt as a child only to feel myself lit on fire with excitement to now know that pyramids expand throughout the world.
It’s like Optimus Prime just sitting there, dormant, with the rest of the unknown to a point where I look at mountains standing alone, wondering if all the others, the ranges, bow down to that one! (You see that freedom of the mind breathing!)
You must wonder. You must inquire. You must seek.
How else will we ever know the real truth of tomorrow if we stop and just believe the truths of today?
So, I listened, spewed out a few input myself, but most of all, like a daily harvest, I’ve gathered.
By my most celebrated golden years, I have learned a few about love, life, and liberty.
Most and above of all lessons?
None are free.
Love costs.
Life costs.
Liberty costs.
And, when you are passionate about all three, you risk all of you.
Respectfully, to honor one who I thought was one of the few Zeitgesit of our recent years, I will only note briefly how I came to find losing a fearless voice of our time to speak his truth.
My husband and I were listening to the voice of Charlie Kirk speaking passionately about his views. His voice was not new to my ears as I listened to his thoughts many times.
My husband announced, “Someone killed him.”
My filters were definitely on because it was only until the next day whereupon my husband saying repeatedly the message to me one more time (perhaps a few more before that), I finally registered the message.
I immediately went to my phone to confirm what only became more louder in my ears as I read the ongoing reports of the university campus incident.
One free voice to speak his truth that led to costing him his last breath.
We guard our truth while open to hear other truths.
Charlie Kirk exhibited such strength to keep his truth untampered at best, standing firmly and unrelentingly on his convictions.
One who pushes you to question their truth while backing yours- how is this seen as threatening upon open debate?
While we may think to hold strong convictions of our own, those who open up for conversation and debate, are they not opening up the forum so that you also speak yours?
While we may hold relentless beliefs of what we believe to be true, could there be a possibility that what we unstoppably seek is to be proven wrong?
Are not theories theoretically the best explanation so far until another better one comes along?
Is that not how we arrive at exactness of truth?
No matter how concrete, can not a bulldozer or a wrecking ball take down even the most undeniable or accepted?
Papa most always walked out of the room or the house to stand outside the door or lean against his car whenever he felt he wasn’t getting through to Mama his point of view but he always came back.
Does one who opens thyself vulnerably to the world really suggest they know they are fully right to a point where their freedom to hold such passion of their beliefs risks being taken?
When Papa and Mama called me on the phone even at my married age so they could continue to speak their minds with me, even to a point where they had to then call me, I was privileged to have them believe me so worthy.
I grew in those conversations, even (especially) in the most heated ones because truth became clearer to me upon hearing vantage points of differing mindsets.
The only threat to one’s freedom are when there are those who believe their freedom is worth more.
The author in Nexus, Yuval Noah Harari, created an enlightening moment for me by suggesting that even after all that he wrote, one could question all of its truth, coming from artificial (alien, his term; autonomous, my future term) intelligence and not from human reports at all (although backed by much noted research).
In this world, how do we really know?
How deeply rooted is our truth from truth of absolute?
I will be one of the last to truly know the motivated truth of this latest loss.
I can only hope that in seeming truth, one breathes in deep within the investigation.
Inhale. Exhale.
Inhale. Exhale.
