freedom

Lately I have been wanting to find more freedom in my life. I want to be free of certain things in myself, but also be free to be myself.  I see different pictures or quotes and I think "I want that!"  I imagine myself running wild through a field with the wind in my hair and not a care in the world. The problem is freedom doesn't just appear on your doorstep, take over all your responsibility's and say "the world is yours." Freedom is not free. There are somethings I believe are freely given, but most things are obtained not given.  I love this story Erwin McManus tells in his book Uprising.

Although the student had the opportunity, he really didn't have the freedom. Opportunity and freedom are not the same thing. Chris's freedom to play the full spectrum of music, to passionately express the music within his soul, was only available to him as a result of years and years of discipline. Discipline can be confused with conformity. Many times we run from discipline or at least resist it because we feel we are being forced to conform in the most negative sense of the word. No one wants to be a clone. No one's life ambition is to be a carbon copy of someone else (except, of course, all those Elvis impersonators). Yet the irony is that when we forsake discipline in our attempt to avoid conformity, we lose our potential to be truly free. 

I was thinking about all this as I was running the other day, sometimes when I run it feels like freedom, it loosens something within me and I will end up sprinting with no effort at all. Most days are not like that though and this was not one of those days. I was tired and longed to feel the freedom of running, but instead I felt like I was dragging myself through the routine and no matter how hard I tried it was not going to get easier.  The thought occurred to me, more than once, that perhaps I was pushing myself too hard and should just walk or head back home, but if I only ran when it felt like I was floating on the earth I would probably never run.  I was thinking about the feeling of floating over the earth as I ran, but the thing is, this is a rather new feeling. I have almost always found joy in running, but the sensation of floating over the earth with ease has only started happening in the last month or so.  I have been working on my form and my energy as I run, I have been observing myself as I run, not just my form, but my thoughts as well. This is taken extra work and energy as well as me setting my ego aside to take a slower pace for the sake of keeping my form.  The fruit of this, of course, is that I have found when everything lines up just so, I can run without any effort at all. It literally feels as though my feet are floating over the earth. All this made me think about freedom and what McManus had said about it.  I thought about it most of the run, about how I view freedom as me running wild in a field, but really freedom looks much more like William Wallace at the end of Braveheart. Freedom takes work, discipline, and effort. Working towards freedom may mean creating boundaries and  disciplines that feel a lot like losing our freedom, but it is through these that we are able to find the freedom to express what lays within our hearts.