"What is Freedom?" is a question my son asked of the extended family last summer for his AP Government class.
My mother had the best answer of all of us: "Freedom doesn't exist. When you love other people, when you have responsibilities, you give up freedom." Deep, Mom! Freedom is just an ideal that you don't really want because you do actually want to be caught up in a web of relationships and responsibilities that give your life meaning and ground you in society.
Sure, I am in principle free to roam this Earth however and whenever I choose, but I am constrained by choice... and by gravity.
I live in a well that's inside of a well inside of another well that is itself in a large, abstract well.
I have a family I provide for, a school I work in with its students and faculty that have certain expectations, a country that I pay taxes to and owe some measure of allegiance to, a species that I want to see thrive and survive into the future, a beautiful and delicate ecosystem of plants and animals I would also like to see thrive. Responsibilities galore (and their incumbent limitations on my freedom).
I also live in the bottom of gravitational well created by the mass of this planet which is, in turn, nestled deeply in the well created by the Sun. The entirety of that deep Solar well is buried within the wide well of the entire Milky Way Galaxy. The big, fat abstract well of the Milky Way is actually loosely buried in an even fatter, wider well created by our local group of galaxies as we all fly towards each other in the midst of ever-widening ocean of receding galaxies. (So, no, it's not turtles all the way down... but it is several layers of turtles stacked on top of each other I grant you).
So, here I am: Trapped within traps within traps. Some of my own devising and others I was born inside of. I can despair of my Sisyphean plight, or I can go all Camus on my lot and think "Freedom is here, in my mind, as I enjoy reflecting upon the fact that I can appreciate all the wells I find myself inside of."
How's that, Mom?
