After running around attending to the needs of various kids, I had just poured a fresh cup of coffee, grabbed my book and sat down to relax.
As if intentionally timing her request to my first sip, my daughter summoned,“Daddy, get me a glass of milk.” This is the exchange that followed:
“You realize this vacation is for Mommy and Daddy too, you know. You’ve been on vacation all summer and we just get this week.”
“What are you talking about vacation all summer? We had to get up for camp, make our beds, listen to you tell us what to do. That’s not vacation. Going away is vacation.”
Weeks earlier I stumbled upon a plaque that said, “Vacation is when you’ve got nowhere to go, nothing to do and all the time in the world to do it.” It was in essence a definition of a certain kind of freedom.
It is a freedom from responsibility, from directives, from expectations, from obligations, from stress, from danger.
This freedom from is an often overlooked pre-requisite to the more commonly aspirational type of freedom – freedom to….
Freedom to do what we want, to pursue our dreams, to make our own choices, to say or own whatever we desire.
The catch is that you can’t have the second until you first secure the first. Freedom from allows us to pursue freedoms to.
I kept this in mind for the rest of our vacation. There was no unnecessary scheduling, no plans that couldn’t be altered. “You don’t want to go to the beach today, cool. You want to sleep in – go for it. You want to just play in the backyard all day – sounds great.”
By creating an environment of “freedom from”, they felt the “freedom to”. Freedom to play, to be silly, and even to help themselves.
On this last point, it is worth noting that I can’t remember a time when my children behaved so well towards each other and with us. It was a remarkable demonstration of how being free changes how we treat others.
In our current political context, some naturally focus on providing “freedom from” – discrimination, poverty, fear and violence. While others seek to create more “freedom to” – speak freely, take risks, vote, own guns, pursue opportunities.
Perhaps if more of our leaders recognized how intrinsically linked these two types of freedom are, they would behave better as well.