Have you ever wondered what true freedom actually looks like?
For me it’s what you feel when you truly arrive. When you become a fully integrated person. What I mean by that is someone who accepts themselves completely as they are, without judgement and without wishing they could change fundamental things about themselves or the world around us. Someone who keeps themselves balanced and trusts their own instincts without hesitation
As an example, my wife and I have now arrived at a certain age and occasionally one of us will have a ‘senior moment,’ like when one of us says, “why am I staring into the fridge like this. There must be something I wanted.” Lots of people find this a cause of great anxiety – “OMG, I’m getting older,” they think, whereas I tend to find such incidents amusing, and I laugh at them. “Thank heavens I’m getting older,” I say. “Now I appreciate life to the full and I can do whatever I like.”
No matter how successful you might be in achieving your goals, if you keep getting hung up by what I would regard as trivialities, you are not free. To put it another way, if you still sweat the small stuff, you are not free.
I don’t mean to be disrespectful here. Of course if you really are seriously losing your cognitive abilities due to an illness, that’s not amusing and it’s probably much harder to reach that place of acceptance. But losing bits of your short-term memory as you get older is to be expected. And it’s no big deal really.
The other day I met up with a group of people, some of whom were fairly senior citizens, and though we’ve met at least half a dozen time, I can remember very few of their names, even though they have told me them on many occasions. That’s just how it is. But no-one seems to be in the least bit worried about it. I simply ask someone for the umpteenth time what their name is, saying, “sorry, I’m hopeless with names,” and more often than not, as they tell me their name again, they admit, “me too. Sorry, what was your name again?” C’est las vie. We both know perfectly well we will have to meet many more times before we remember each other’s name.
Something else, and this often crops up in Life Coaching sessions is the person who constantly berates themselves for some little tiny thing they get wrong. They get obsessed with trying to be perfect. You’re certainly not free if you have an obsession, because it drives your behaviour, your reactions and your anxiety.
“Look at it this way,” I usually suggest. “if you do 100 things in a day, and 99 of them turn out fine but one goes pear shaped, which is the one you focus on at the end of the day? Of course it’s the one you got wrong. That’s entirely natural, but to be obsessed by it, while forgetting or ignoring the other 99 things that went well is simply not reasonable or justifiable and certainly not a balanced view of reality. A 99% success rate is something remarkable to be celebrated, and yet you choose to obsess about the one thing you got wrong and can correct tomorrow.”
That is not the road to freedom. Acceptance is the only road to freedom
In the film, Bridge of Spies, attorney James Donovan (played by Tom Hanks) asked Rudolf Abel, the alleged KGB spy (played by Mark Rylance), who is accused by the CIA of various espionage related crimes against the USA, if he was not worried of being found guilty and sentenced to death. His reply was, “would it help?”
Now that’s what I call a state of true acceptance!