I think everyone likes the word “freedom”. Of course I like it too.
I saw a survey in some magazine once, and in a survey of favorite words, it was ranked second only to “dream”. I think this result is, well, understandable.
However, it is not so much that people start thinking about their dreams at an early age (even kindergarteners talk about their dreams for the future).
I think they start thinking about freedom a little later.
Generally speaking, I think that people start thinking about freedom from the time when they are generally considered to be in the middle of their lives. That is the same time when they start to feel inconvenienced by their family and society.
I don’t think there are many people who can live their whole life without thinking “I want to be free.
I hated school so much that by the time I was in the third grade of elementary school, I was thinking like Yutaka Ozaki, “I want to be free as soon as possible. However, I didn’t have the courage to jump out of school, so I persevered and managed to graduate from college.
I managed to graduate from college, but the training for new employees at the first apparel company I worked for was so tough that I even tried to escape from the company in the middle of the training.
I even tried to escape during the training, but in the end I didn’t have the courage to do so (it was in the sea of trees at the foot of Mt.) I continued to work for about a year, but I never dreamed of freedom, just stared blankly at the sky.
And I kept thinking about freedom. I was always saying to myself, “How inconvenient I am!
One day, however, a senior employee said to me, “All you do is complain.
You complain a lot, but you were and still are free.
At first I did not understand what he meant, but then he added
I did not understand what he meant at first, but he added, “The reason you feel inconvenienced is because you think you have few options for the future, and it was your decision to reduce those options, wasn’t it? That has nothing to do with freedom or inconvenience. That’s a different category. It’s just ‘fear.'”
Aside from when you are a child, you are the one who chose the school, the company, and even if your parents force you to do something, you are the one who ultimately made the choice. This means that if he did not like it, he should have had the freedom to stubbornly refuse.
In other words, he meant that the spirit is always free, and it is he who is making it inconvenient. It is wrong to blame society or the company for this, and it is your own fault for creating the current crippled state, and that you can be free tomorrow if you want to be.
Of course, there may be times when you are physically or mentally crippled for compelling reasons, such as in prison or as a child.
However, inconvenience, such as being crammed into a crowded train and blurting out, “Oh, how I wish I could be free,” is a natural prerequisite for living, and it follows you wherever you go. Therefore, he taught me that it is disgraceful to blurt out “Oh, I wish I were free.
We have the freedom to live and the freedom to die at the same time. We have the freedom to live healthy and, conversely, the freedom to live unhealthy.
However, there is something we lose when we gain freedom, and that is fear, which is the real reason why we feel crippled.
The desire for freedom and the fear that accompanies it. It is that fear that inhibits freedom. And as long as we cannot completely eliminate that fear, we may always be obligated to feel inconvenienced.
And there are those who take advantage of such fears to sweet-talk their way into business. There are also those who show off their success in overcoming their fears.
In the real world, many are forced to train to overcome their fears.
The fear of death that you overcome to become a great soldier, the fear of interpersonal relationships that you overcome to become a great salesman. We will always have to weigh the freedom to run away without doing it versus overcoming our fears.
But will those who overcome their fears in this way really be free? On the contrary, they may be narrowing their own options and crippling themselves further.
When we weigh freedom and fear, I think it is important to constantly reflect on whether or not we are continuing to bend, force, and brainwash ourselves.
When we assume that we really have no other choice, we tend to get sick when we lose it. I believe that the way to avoid feeling crippled is to determine whether the training and hard work that is imposed on you is really necessary for your freedom or whether you don’t have to do it.
As philosopher Erich Fromm says in his book “Escape from Freedom,” freedom is a very difficult concept to handle, and if we mishandle it even a little, we tend to make mistakes in life as well.
After all, all human beings are born free in a spiritual sense. Total freedom is something that only a truly enlightened person or a pre-materialistic baby can have.
See you soon.
