Captivity Will Set You Free

I was eating a dinner with a friend tonight and I was reminded of a talk by Norman Fischer that I attended a couple of months ago. There was a lot of meditation, and talk about creativity, but at the end it boiled down to one salient point:

Choice is crippling and leads to paralysis. Freedom is found in accepting or creating limitations.

One only need to shop for toothpaste to appreciate this. Any of the choices in the aisle will almost certainly have the same effect on your life, yet we spend time and become anxious deciding what kind of toothpaste to buy.

My friend at dinner was talking about how she felt like she definitely couldn't settle in Seattle. She had too many friends all over globe, too many communities, too many different versions of herself. The thought of picking the one here and now and sticking with it was deeply unsatisfactory.

I can relate to the feeling. For the longest time any kind of travel would make me wistful and desirous of living a life I never had, of meeting people I would never know. Relative to the wide open possibilities presented by the fictitious other life I had created in my mind, my life felt trapped, confined and ultimately worthless.

Writing about this brings me back to a quote from Pascal that I read in Living with the Devil:

"All of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone..."

To sit with yourself, alone, in a quiet room is to confront your life as it is. There is no room for imagined worlds where you are someone else who's problems are all gone. If you sit for long enough, you'll realize that no matter where you go, you'll always end up exactly where you left - in your body, in your mind.

To limit your life to its present scope and to accept this frame, these limitations, frees you from the tyranny of the unknown and the unknowable. The delusions and daydreams of your un-lived lives lose their power. You're sitting here, where are you, being who you will always be, and accepting it.