You need to be free. I always want to remember that. Lately, I am learning the myriad of ways we are not free. The two things that come to war with each other are Convenience and Freedom. We occasionally will find ourselves sacrificing dear Freedom for the fast and beautiful luster of Convenience. Here’s why this probably happens.

As biological creatures, we have evolved to seek hard, fast and real results. Convenience tends to reign over all the parades, because it is immediate, gratifying and tangible. Our dear Freedom is a broader being, multi-layered and requires more mental energy to be exerted by the human mind to parse and evaluate. I’m not saying that Freedom is a burden – though there are many entities who would tell you otherwise – but that when it comes time to choose between desperately trying to end the suffering of a famished belly over not buying food from the only vendor around to rid you of your pain, but who just so happens to be a constant violator of the liberties of its workers and sources, some would choose to buy the food rather than not support the vendor and continue to suffer in their hunger. The problem is perpetuated when we are surrounded by something big, central and omnipresent with a motive to sell and to provide in order to satiate its consumer’s wants at any cost to feed the unruly machine – a vicious cycle. These machines work like a meat grinder for grinding the masses. It can be hard to escape the grind when you don’t know you’re being ground. Here are some examples of how we may not be free. Please see the links following What’s bad about… at stallman.org Those examples are more tech oriented, but the concepts should come through. To be fair to this post’s theme about thinking, you should also try to think of examples of a What’s good about… as you read through. A friendly reminder from me to you on some definitions.

free:
Not imprisoned or enslaved
Not controlled by obligation or the will of another
Having political independence

freedom:
The condition of being free
Liberty of the person from slavery, detention, or oppression
Political independence

Lucky for us we have some useful tools at our disposal. When we step back, slow down and think about our choices we can have a better view of the world. It helps to think about an action and the multiplicative effect of that action when an entire populace acts it. For example, should you just throw trash out your window nilly-willy-free-willy while on the highway leaving a wake of sadness? What if everyone on and who will ever pass that highway did as you did you speed demon? What kind of world would we observe? Do you like it? Is it good or bad? Why? At the very least, answering these questions sheds light on the unknowing darkness and that’s a good part of the battle. It is a problem when we don’t think about the consequences and worse when we think there are zero for our actions and thus cast a blind eye.

Everyone comes into this world with their own moral compass and as we move along that multi-colored thread of our lives, our compass flickers and recalibrates which for some will eventually settle on the truest north they’ve ever known while for others there will be many norths and further yet there will be others where the compass spins frantically until nothing. There must be balance when our world is only so finite. We will have failed when we do not allow further moral compasses to generate – the Big Sleep for humanity. We will have succeeded when we as a species sustain until all our questions have been answered¹.

We need to be free in the ways that promote balance and only accept those free actions whose consequences promote balance. What we seek is balanced freedom in all domains. When there is an inkling of restriction against this, we must get to its root. Our capacity to think causes us our greatest pain and our most sublime happiness.