On Freedom and Fences

            There once was a study conducted on school children. They took two groups out to a playground and let them play however they chose. One playground had a fence containing it. The other did not. The group that was taken to the playground with the fence behaved as children often do: they took up the space. They spread out, formed their different games, marched and hunted along the fenceline, climbed the fence; explored the nooks and the crannies.

With the other group, one might imagine that it would be much the same, except without a fence: the children would spill out into the world, letting their curiosities take them wherever they would; exploring every nook and every cranny. But that’s not what happened. Instead they huddled in the center of the field, playing games that mercifully allowed every one to stay as close to the pack as possible.

           

            I spent years on the road. I went everywhere.  I hitchhiked, I worked, I explored, I couchsurfed, I made love, I read books, and I let my heart dictate each movement I made. The only fences I had were my remaining funds and vague, abstract preconceptions of what I wanted to be doing, who I was trying to become. How romantic, right? 

            The experience taught me something completely unexpected: the world is too big. And being too big, it becomes too small.

When I look back on how I spent my years on the road I am mostly appalled by my lack of imagination. Having nothing but free time and the freedom to go anywhere, to do anything (so long as I had the funds and the courage), I now realize that it caused me to shut down and fill my time with invented deadlines for finishing books, catching trains, arriving in new cities, seeing sites I hardly cared about. I was neurotically collecting places in a desperate attempt to fill the empty space. I was as a child huddling in the middle of a field, except the huddle was my own thoughts and the field was a body in such constant movement that it masked the truth of its stasis.

             In the face of doing so little with my unending time, I began to resent my freedom. I could literally go anywhere and do anything (a dream come true!) and I was doing almost nothing of any significance. That resentment led to a cynicism towards all the places of the world as a kind of childish scapegoating: everywhere was basically the same, people are people wherever you go, dehumanizing commerce rules everything, and it’s the world’s (or at least the modern age’s) fault for not being able to offer anything of substance for me to sink my teeth into.

The world became too small. There was nowhere to go, nothing to do that offered any real escape from an essential panic that surrounded just moving through the world as an unattached visitor. When you have nothing at stake in a place, it becomes just another 'here' where you need to find food, shelter, entertainment, and maybe a little conversation (which, incidentally, when you’re cynical, all conversations start to feel the same – that is to say: futile).

I tried to tell myself that God was in the details. If I only paid more attention to what was happening around me, then I could appreciate it all better. But that wasn’t the case. No matter how rich the storylines of places proved to be, they always seemed to just be playing out tired old archetypes that reinforced how boring the modern world had really become. I felt like I was trying and trying, but only managing to tire myself out and prove my own sad incompetence (which compounded the resentment all the more) in the process.    

But then I had a breakthrough: I started building fences: fences around plots of land, plots of life: I made commitments: projects, timelines, and responsibilities. Things I couldn’t just float through, but had to rise to the occasion for. Challenges. For once, I didn’t have all the freedom in the world. And it was like the world had somehow filled with color, with nuance. It started to feel like everything was inverted from what it had been. Before, everything was possible so nothing was interesting. Now, because I was stuck with one thing, it became a pathway to better understanding everything else. Small things began to feel terribly significant, like metaphors for the world as a whole. And I found that they could absorb me.

            Some people have told me they found my lifestyle of hitchhiking in supposedly dangerous places to be courageous. Perhaps there was one kind of courage involved in that, but I’ve never given it much credit myself. It didn't feel courageous. Instead, it felt like an unending process of just passing through here and there, time and time again. Where’s the courage in that? Real courage, I've come to feel, is in committing to somewhere, be it a place, a community, a family, a job, and in seeing it through. I don't believe that freedom is the ability to do whatever you want, whenever you want. More often than not, that just proves to be paralyzing. Real freedom comes in renouncing one’s freedom and in building a fence. It's within a contained life that one can grow and build and learn and explore. But mostly, participate in an authentic way.

Saturday, March 8th, 2014
The Laughing Goat
Boulder, CO