Glorious freedom

Independence is always relative to circumstance, conditioned by prior choice, properly expressed with an eye to the totality of one's largest life commitments. For instance, consider the way I spent my July 4 holiday.

Left to my own devices, in an alternate universe of personal solitude, I'd have expressed my independence on our rainy Nashville Independence Day by spending my time the way I do most summer days when others have no claim to stake on my time and attention: wake, drink coffee and write, walk, eat, read, swim, write, eat, bike, read etc., most of it outdoors, much of it in hammocks and in the company of dogs, too much of it online. The gas grill would at some point have been deployed. Late in the day I'd have tagged someone to accompany me to dinner and a ballgame, were the Sounds in town. Then there would have been ballpark fireworks. I'd have called that a good day.

But by dint of circumstance and prior choice and existential commitment, my holidays are family days. The family had plans.

We joined huddled masses of thousands of strangers at Opry Mills, the local version of Mall of America reclaimed from the big flood of 2010. We ate lunch in a demoralizing food court (Panda Express, without an express lane) full of the rotund slow folk my old friend at the defunct bookstore called Waddlers. We ambled precariously through the maze of heavy foot traffic of heavy people. We shopped, for shoes and dresses and dorm furnishings. We saw Despicable Me. The rain finally abated, for just a bit. We drove downtown and  parked for $20. We watched the riverfront rockets' red glare. We gloried in our freedom. "Look at y'all! Where'd y'all come from?!"



And it was a very good day.

Freedom

Every July 4 I take a free moment to think determinedly about self-reliance.

Best book ever on the general theme of independence: Richard Ford's Independence Day. (Ford himself prefers Emerson's Self-reliance for "its implicit goal of leaving us as it found us: free.")

It's a great road book, too. The action centers on Cooperstown and the baseball hall of fame. It reflects wisely on just how much, and how little, any of us can help anyone else (our own kids included) be free.

There is a time in every man's education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide; that he must take himself for better, for worse, as his portion;…The power which resides in him is new in nature, and none but he knows what that is which he can do, nor does he know until he has tried.

Ralph Waldo Emerson, "Self Reliance,"
Essays, First Series, 1841.

DS 7.4.09