Every Sunday night I hear a steady flow of plastic wheels on rocky ground as my neighbours take their bins to the street, stopping to greet one another or catch up on the latest town talk.
There are twelve homes in our little white gate community, and this garbage bin ritual is something I’ve come to cherish in the eighteen months I’ve lived here. And something I think I’ll really miss when I leave in four short weeks.
This afternoon, I stepped outside to get some fresh air and ran into my neighbour Kat walking up our forested driveway with her garbage bins in tow. She greeted me with a big smile and I waved back, my heart warming.
“Are you getting all packed up and ready to go?”, she asked
I laughed as I said, “I’m not really one of those people to start packing yet, plus I don’t have that much stuff”.
“I envy you for that”, she said. Then she sighed, long and nostalgic, as if she were reminiscing about days long past. She pointed to my van, its doors wide open, my single bed clearly visible.
“I was looking at that bed in your van as I was walked to the street”, she said.
That cute sleeping bag, and your pillow… and I just thought… ah that’s me. I am such a gypsy at heart”!
I’d been hanging in my van for the last three days, cruising around and sleeping by the beach. I wanted to start practicing for the nomad adventure that begins when I move.
“I’ve been here seventeen years” she said, “and I feel like it’s long past time to go”
I could see it in her then, the longing for freedom that my adventures were bringing up for her, this woman who had travelled extensively in her youth, who had become a mother and a wife late in life, and who had built their beautiful home here almost two decades ago. She had security, comfort and companionship. But she was longing for just a little more freedom.
I’ve been mulling it over since our talk, this constant push pull between aliveness and comfort, or as Tony Robbins puts it, variety and certainty. Tony says that variety and certainty are two of the six core human needs, and that we need both. (You can check out my post about Tony Robbin’s Six Core Needs here)
Security, familiarity, comfort and companionship are some of the things you lose when you live for freedom, and that’s an experience I know well. Right before I ran into Kat I’d been sitting in my chair having a little panic. Do I really want to go travel? Do I really want to leave this place of comfort, and step once again into the unknown?
Most of me does, yet part of me is scared too.
Afraid of the loss of community that leaving will cause. Afraid of the possibility of isolation and loneliness, and for the general insecurity that the nomadic life can bring.
Yet, I long to feel insanely alive. I love to experience strange things, to feel my heart beat with the anticipation of something new, and my eyes light up with sights they’ve never seen before. It’s not that I’m ungrateful, I can clearly look around me and see the worlds beauty. I can feel like the luckiest girl in the world. And I can still want something else.
Not because I want more, but because I want different.
I’ve been thinking a lot lately about freedom, and wondering, are we really ever free? In the dimension of form, it seems we are always bound to something. If we work for a salary, we are bound to that check. If we work for ourselves, we are bound to our own discipline (or lack of). Sometimes, I felt more free when I was a firefighter on a salary, than at the whims of my own fluctuating work ethic.
It’s truly a question worth pondering, and the longer I sit with it the more I see that on the outside, we can never really be free. You can give up everything you have, your career, your house, your car, and still, if your mind is stuck, you won’t be free.
Freedom then, is an inside job.
It’s not the WHAT we do that counts, it’s the HOW we do it. What do we think? How do we feel? What do we cling to? How do we feel about being alone? Do we listen to the fear that arises when we step outside of comfort?
Most importantly, true freedom is about finding that individual balance between those two core needs, variety and certainty. Some people want more certainty, some want more variety.
The real question is, what is the right balance for you?
We can’t live someone else’s dream, we can only live our own.
And no one knows what that dream is but you.
