Many years ago, I used to see the word “Responsibility” as a negative term, as something to avoid, because it involved work, or having to answer to someone, and I wanted to be free of all this, free of all responsibilities, and like in an utopic world, live life intensely while not caring about anything, including any consequences of my actions.
However, since I was still living on this planet and had to make choices as a human being, someone had to be responsible for these choices, and I decided that it was going to be anyone but me. Friends, Family, Society, even random strangers, I consulted everyone but myself before making a choice, and more often than not just took the average response and went with that, unconsciously satisfying a childish desire to be free of any responsibility. And as our choices make up our lives, I managed to not take responsibility for most of my life, thinking that was Freedom.
The problem there was that I had supposedly freed up myself from responsibilities, but ended up locking myself up in a cage made of choices that are not really mine. Ironically, the absolute freedom I was desperately looking for put me behind bars that I didn’t really choose, bars made of other people opinions and values where I removed myself from the equation.
See, the issue was that I had missed the point of Freedom: Freedom was not to live outside of a prison, but Freedom was to choose your own prison.
Because my friend we are all ending up in a prison anyway: Our daily choices make up who we will become and where we will end up, and the more choices we make, the more we move from the big roads and highways of our lives, to the smaller streets and into the smaller lanes.
There are infinite paths we can take and an infinite combinations of roads, streets and lanes. But we cannot not take any and always stay on the shore. We have to make choices, and these choices lead us down to the narrow path of our life, and that defines the limits of our prison.
So the question is not whether we can escape being in a cage, because we are all ending up in one. The question is whether it is a cage of our own making or not.
“Unlimited possibilities are not suited to man; if they existed, his life would only dissolve in the boundless. To become strong, a man’s life needs the limitations ordained by duty and voluntarily accepted. The individual attains significance as a free spirit only by surrounding himself with these limitations and by determining for himself what his duty is.”
The I Ching or Book of Changes, Hexagram 60
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