Freedom and decisions

People who aren’t free think freedom must be great. They’re not wrong, but they’re not seeing the whole picture. When you have total freedom you’re always in a place of decision. You wake up every day thinking about what you’ll do with your time. Where will you go? Who will you talk to? When?

Day after day, week after the week, month after month, that can be exhausting – and the opposite of that – some routine, some knowledge of what the foreseeable future will contain, no longer always having to create and decide – that can come as a blesséd relief. A job, a course of study, some contract – all things that are binding, and yet…counterintuitively, they bring one liberation.

I’m at that point too much. It makes you weird. And I remember only too well the lovely relaxing feeling of being tied in to something, of being committed, and of ‘losing’ my freedom.

I like it – even if I, sooner or later, rail against it and burst once more into the unknown.

Too many times, sometimes, I find myself singing Dusty Springfield’s “I Just Don’t Know What To Do With Myself,” and that don’t seem healthy.

Too many times I look around, wondering, what with the world as my oyster, what an earth am I supposed to do with it?

“Supposed”: that’s an interesting word to use. As though there’s something I should be doing, some kind of duty or assigned task – someone else running the show, who could tell me what to do.

I guess there is a part of me that feels like that, even though a casual observation of reality would appear to contradict it.

Then again, there are things that feel ‘wrong’ – and, in tandem, things that feel ‘right’. ‘Right’ is not necessarily what one is ‘supposed’ to do – we can do what we like – but, it would seem to me, ‘feeling right’ is probably what a smart person should aspire to – in the right place, with the right people, doing the right thing – and given that not everything can provide that feeling, that experience, it does appear that choices have to be made.

So, what is one to choose? And how can a man decide? That’s the question. Not, “to be or not to be” but – “what to be, or do, and where to be or do it?”

A certainty in life is that one has to be somewhere: there’s no getting away from that. And one thing that my life seems to be telling me is: I feel better in some places than others.

Hell, I feel downright BAD in some places. And really rather GOOD in others.

Today, I’m in England. I was born in England, and to England I always seem to return. I’m not sure why, exactly: probably out of habit and ease and because there are lots of people here I like, and still a couple of family members alive.

Banking and money and familiarity and such.

So not 100% free, given my habitual return to this land.

I came back at the end of May: I’m not really sure why I did that. I didn’t much want to – I rolled around moaning a bunch on the floor the night I bought my ticket, and came within a whisker of cancelling it – but come back I did, and on the whole it’s been nice. Nice times with good people. None of that crazy despair I experienced in 2015/16. Not really minding anything.

I’ve thought many times I should perhaps just stay here. Maybe even live again in London, where most of my favourite people are.

But, of course, the noise of that city made it quickly unbearable, and nowhere else I’ve been has presented itself as somewhere I could make a possible home.

And, moreso…

I have this strange thing, that doesn’t make any rational sense. It started pretty much immediately upon my return to Europe from Mexico in 2015.

My eyes went bad. I went from having great vision to really struggling to read street signs.

I had to get contact lenses. It was freaking me out, because I had laser eye surgery in 2008, and everything had been great since then.

Interestingly, a very nice optician I talked to suggested it might be stress related. I didn’t feel stressed out, but then, I guess there are stresses that we don’t really notice.

Once, when living in London – this was back in 2010 – I started getting this weird swelling in my face. Doctors provided no illumination – but whenever I thought about it, I felt it was related to my job. I even had dreams that seemed to say as much.

Naturally, when I quit the job, the swelling desisted, and hasn’t come back since.

But that was tolerable: playing with one’s eyesight isn’t. And it was with great relief that, not too long after returning to Mexico last year, I watched as my eyesight quickly improved and notices in grocery stores, children sitting at the back of classrooms came back into focus.

It’s very odd, I know. But, it happened.

And, not only did it happen then, it happened again when I came back to England in May. Walking from the plane. Feeling happy and enjoying the pleasant English orderliness after Mexican free-for-all dust and chaos/exuberance/freedom.

My eyes had gone bad. And I told myself, well, I guess we won’t be staying long.

And every time I’ve sat with someone wonderful, or got into something good, in that moment of thinking, why would I want to leave here? I remember: because I can’t stay. Because something’s telling me this isn’t the ‘right’ place for me right now. Because there’s somewhere else I’m ‘supposed’ to be, where my eyes don’t go bad, and where this barely noticeable stress is absent.

But where is that place? That’s really the question for me. Not what to do or who to be – those things take care of themselves – but where, where, where?

That’s the ticket that gets the ball rolling.

And so, I look at flights every day and try to figure out where I should. I think of Mexico, and look at options there. I think of San Miguel Allende, the lovely writerly town north of Mexico City, and I think of Baja – good ol’ Baja – which puzzles me, but…I do keep dreaming about it, and I do always seem to end up back there, sooner or later.

I also think of Asia, and wonder if I shouldn’t try something new – and about six weeks ago I was a click away from buying a ticket to Malaysia, but a coin came down ‘tails’ instead of ‘heads’ and dictated otherwise.

The six weeks since then I’ve been on a conveyor belt. One friend after another has offered invitations, housesitting gigs, little chunks of work that felt like the right thing to accept. It’s been a nice time. I haven’t minded putting my jetting on hold. I thought there might have been some reason for me to have stayed in England during that time, but nothing’s arisen that I can particularly put my finger on.

Now that conveyor belt period seems to have come to an end, and it’s time once more for the unknown future.

The question is: do I click on that plane ticket that my finger’s been hovering over the past few days? Or do I hold on some more, risk losing it, and see what else transpires?

I don’t know – and yet, at some point, I’ll have to. Otherwise it’s just the interminable going round in circles, and going nowhere at all, while the world still spins and time ticks ever onwards, to old age and the grave.

Time is finite these days: there’s no getting away from that.