While watching TV at the waiting room of a hospital where my wife had a checkup for the pains in her hands, I took notice of a protester in Libya holding up a placard with the word "Freedom." She was among the residents in an eastern enclave of the North African country supporting the insurrection seeking to end Muammar Gadaffi's four decades of iron-fist rule.
I wanted to write a blog on that day but had to forgo my passion to accompany my wife. And I remembered my professor in political science when I was in my second year in college. One day, he raised a question that sank deep into my brain for the rest of my life. "If we have freedom, as we always say, how come we can't jump up to 20 feet high?" At first I thought it was a crazy question.
Our classroom fell silent. "The answer is in your textbook," he intoned. When no one dared to raise a hand, he went on. "The answer is that freedom is not absolute." He then told us to always seek the practical applications of theories we were learning in school. "Memorizing all the theories you are learning in school will not make you literate."
I amused myself with that memory while waiting for my wife to come out of the clinic. How true that our freedom is not absolute. In that particular case, my choices were limited to writing my blog or accompanying my wife. Of course, any husband knows that the choice was clear, as a 7-Up commercial had put it. It's safer to take a risk with the wrath of a storm than with the wrath of a wife. At home after my wife's checkup, I felt like not going to work, which starts at 12 noon, and had to drag my feet in going to the office.
In politics, as in our personal lives, freedom has its own limitations. Of course, we know that. Ditto with our social interactions. There are always laws, rules or ethics to follow. Our freedom ends where the freedom of others begins. Democracy is a self-regulating respect for one another's freedom or rights. That's even true with non-living things. You can not put two books in one place at the same time. You have to put one on top of the other. There's a law on that - the law of physics.
Probably, we can only have absolute freedom when we become no longer flesh. I used to read stories on near-death experiences and it amazes me that those who claimed to have had such experiences spoke of an ethereal world where there was more freedom like flying freely in space, seeing one's life on earth played back before one's eyes as if one was in so many places at a given time and the absence of worries. Religion tells us that if you stack your cards with divine aces in this game called life you will win heaven, a place called paradise.
Could the lofty but elusive concepts we are pursuing in this world are but our intuitive reflections of what life is in a world beyond?
I wanted to write a blog on that day but had to forgo my passion to accompany my wife. And I remembered my professor in political science when I was in my second year in college. One day, he raised a question that sank deep into my brain for the rest of my life. "If we have freedom, as we always say, how come we can't jump up to 20 feet high?" At first I thought it was a crazy question.
Our classroom fell silent. "The answer is in your textbook," he intoned. When no one dared to raise a hand, he went on. "The answer is that freedom is not absolute." He then told us to always seek the practical applications of theories we were learning in school. "Memorizing all the theories you are learning in school will not make you literate."
I amused myself with that memory while waiting for my wife to come out of the clinic. How true that our freedom is not absolute. In that particular case, my choices were limited to writing my blog or accompanying my wife. Of course, any husband knows that the choice was clear, as a 7-Up commercial had put it. It's safer to take a risk with the wrath of a storm than with the wrath of a wife. At home after my wife's checkup, I felt like not going to work, which starts at 12 noon, and had to drag my feet in going to the office.
In politics, as in our personal lives, freedom has its own limitations. Of course, we know that. Ditto with our social interactions. There are always laws, rules or ethics to follow. Our freedom ends where the freedom of others begins. Democracy is a self-regulating respect for one another's freedom or rights. That's even true with non-living things. You can not put two books in one place at the same time. You have to put one on top of the other. There's a law on that - the law of physics.
Probably, we can only have absolute freedom when we become no longer flesh. I used to read stories on near-death experiences and it amazes me that those who claimed to have had such experiences spoke of an ethereal world where there was more freedom like flying freely in space, seeing one's life on earth played back before one's eyes as if one was in so many places at a given time and the absence of worries. Religion tells us that if you stack your cards with divine aces in this game called life you will win heaven, a place called paradise.
Could the lofty but elusive concepts we are pursuing in this world are but our intuitive reflections of what life is in a world beyond?
No comments:
Post a Comment