My Freedom

I sternly believe that it’s the discipline gave me freedom, and thus I trust that freedom is the thing a human can offer to himself actively.

Freedom is a sense, a feeling, and I can feel freedom commonly in my everyday life. I scrutinized what was special with me: is it my ability to travel as I want, or my unrestrained plan of a day? They are depicted freedom, and all those evidence point to my base, which is the desire to offer me freedom —— from myself.

You can’t wake up a person pretending to be asleep: you can’t embrace the freedom unless you fully chase the freedom. I love the feeling when I sit in the car feeling the breath of clouds and exhale of this great land; the feeling when I type on my laptop under the course of clouds with great wind kissing and taking my body; the feeling when I imagined my romantic realization of the ideal world. Those are my desired freedom, and having desires is the first step to achieve desires. I want to plan the day, to actively experience my life and embrace the possibilities like a real nova of youth, and those dreams impel me to chase the freedom.

I was in the notorious Chinese education system, the place where many people couldn’t feel freedom. People usually compare two types of high school, Chinese and international, because of their styles, treatments and student quality, for example. However, for any bird in the cage, and for every student in such a Chinese high school, there must exist a group desiring for the freedom and dictating their own lives. Chinese, Maths, English in that system has no difference with APs and application materials. Simultaneously, we can’t deny the presence of caged, desperating and whom gladly immerse in digital trash and complete degradation students —— same in all education systems.

The contrast arises here: if I slacken (which I mean seriously) in Chinese schools, teachers would always stay at my back and put me back into the right trail, which could appear much less in my current school. The latter is a better state for me, and if I slacken, then I have to pay the cost.

I consider the idea that “I’ll have someone catching me even in the worst case”, not necessarily but mostly appear in Chinese schools, as the primary factor that limits many students’ ability to pursue freedom. If no one is catching me, I have to control my life actively, beginning from planning my study, for example. (Actually, this state should be normal; the former one is abnormal.) I then will not leave tasks like “escaping teachers’ punishment” or “attempting to get as many time as possible for playing games” to waste most of my attention. In my opinion, we could obviously observe many students, in every education system, seeing tasks like those as primary goals. Their unawareness causes the impossibility to think about pursuing more advanced and deep goals.

When I have enough attention on thinking about freedom, the next step I did is to define freedom for myself. As I mentioned, the actions, ideas and states I thought as things related to freedom are just the surface freedom, depicted freedom. The only yet crucial definition for freedom is the fact that I am the chooser, the dictator and the afforder of any possible result from a state. In other word, this is discipline. We could use some examples to illustrate this.

My mother is an artist, an educator and a philanthropist. She has done so many meaningful things in everyone’s perspective, including her own. She feels freedom, because she trusts her actions’ meanings and know exactly about what she could do, want to do and need to afford.
When I sat in the speeding car, seeing spectacular plateau landscape and being captivated by beautiful clouds and sky that doesn’t even look like real, my freedom comes from my realization that I chose to travel here. I chose to travel and play because I convinced me with preparedness to experience everything brought by this choice.

I think it’s abstract here. The main idea I want to convey is that freedom has no relationship with whether you have the ability to feel others’ freedom. When a slave breaks his chain, he shall feel the freedom. A billionaire could also feel freedom, but those are obviously not due to the same thing, not even similar at any aspect! I am free now, and I trust that I could be very free in the future as well, similar to most ordinary people in this world. I’m glad to acknowledge this, and at least glad that I could convince myself this principle in an early age.

What was the most free thing I did in the recent?

I write my texts.

I read the art in Renaissance.

I chatted.

I play the piano. (partially for this one)

I stayed alone and feel at ease at the night before my final AP exam at 5.14

I was writing my AP Lit FRQ during the AP Exam.

I enjoyed the music concert with my best friends.

I am sitting alone in a place and pay attention to my surrounding quietly.

I read Borges.

I watch Buddhas, see paintings and arts.

Whenever I am imagining, perhaps romantic relationship, perhaps spectacular landscapes, or whatever. Just before I sleep; during my transportation in a car or a bus; or just between a gap between any two events.

The first observation is that when I think about freedom I’ve never considered experience with mathematics before. If I force myself to relate freedom with math, I can do that but I don’t do that. Mathematics is cold of humanity, you don’t have natural connections with deep math. I can’t describe this exact experience, though it just like an intuitive impossiblity between my defined mathematics and my defined freedom.

In contrast, whenever I spend continuous and concentrated focus on writing, only “writing something I want to write”, it would arise a specific, enormous and complete sense of freedom. This is easy to understand because writing is somewhere you can have no expectations about others. For “reading”, the freedom is weaker, possibly because the previous described “writing” is too way rare. However, reading definitely worths me to pursue toward freedom. When I enter the flow state during “reading”, it has huge effect of boosting my imagination and my happiness. Yes, the most direct effect is that I could feel happy during that “reading” (not reading standardized course materials or AP Literature, for instance). I can feel that I’m consuming and consumed with the book simultaneously, and I can name it the experience of entering an “excerpt” of universe: a specific room/place in a specific time point of our human history in a specific imagined parallel world aside from our current one. So, this is a form of escaping from current world.

But, one thing I’m confused about is that many other events related to freedom makes me “immerse” more in the current world. So this is apparently distinct from writing and reading. When I enjoyed the music concert with my best friends, chat with teachers, submerge in the lazy atmosphere at the night before my final AP exam (AP ES at 5.14), they are external factors that induce me to feel the current world.

Is there any similarity among “writing a creative novel”, “having all-night party with best friends” and “meditate quietly in a tranquil room”?

I love staring blankly, and literally nothing exists in my mind. I’m not saying I want to do that, but I frequently subconsciously do that.