Freedom – a fully loaded emotion. A feeling that resides in the mind of an individual, the concept of which changes from person to person. Sometimes, it is circumstantial. But most of the times, it, or the lack of it, is an illusion.
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“When the elephant is young and relatively weak, it is tied to an immovable stick. So later, no matter how large and strong he becomes…he continues to believe that he cannot free himself. Many intelligent people are like circus elephants. They never question their self-imposed limitations.”
This is the situation most of us are in. We believe ourselves to be bound to something and make up our minds that we are not free to choose the path we want to take in life. We go on with our lives of 8 hours a day, 5 days a week of work in a relentless journey, or settle ourselves to choices made by someone else in various stages of our lives imagining ourselves to be incapable of making a different choice.
Let me spend some time here describing the featured image of the blog. The image shows a few dots against the blue sky. It appears to be a swarm of bees around the tree. However, the fact behind the photo is that it is a bunch of flies caught on a spider web. Even while taking the photo, I could not see the spider’s web. We are living our lives like that – most of us. We are bound in our minds by various tendrils of web going in different directions – be it our family, our debts, our liabilities, our responsibilities, our fear of failure, fear of being ridiculed in the society or so many other reasons just waiting to jump into our mind, stopping us from pursuing a different path in life
Some of us are happy in this 9-5 weekends free rut of life. Some of us (me included) enjoy working for 8 hours a day 5 days a week and then spending the weekend with family at home, relaxing, cooking, reading or just spending time together. I wouldn’t want to change my life at all. But others wouldn’t feel the same with this lifestyle. Some of us change our likes and dislikes on the basis of the people around us which would make us socially acceptable. Some of us live our lives, most of the times, by constantly ensuring that people around us like us. But for some, we are alright with the choices handed over to us by life and content with living life the way it already is.
Freedom is the power to choose our own chains
Jean Jacques Rousseau
Most of us are definitely free to choose the way of life as much as we would like, but at the end of the day, the chains of our choices shall forever remain with us. So, the path to success with freedom is the ability to make the right choices early in life.
