Robert A. Heinlein once wrote "You can have peace. Or you can have freedom. Don't ever count on having both at once." I don't know what he was writing about, and I suppose it referred to personal wars, a semblance I found in the frontline of my life. Choice has always been paradoxical for me. The privilege itself fails to stress that regardless the path you take, the door you open, the world in which you enter, thereby lives alternatives which you have left, un-trekked, locked closed, shadowed by decline. Choice, despite its association with ownership, independence, free will, autonomy, and self-determination, also means sacrifice, compromise, and loss of possibility.
To the emotionally affected person i.e. me, choice is determined by calculated risk-taking and adhesion to permanent consequences, in other words, choice has scared the shit out of me. Choice wasn't sold to me in the way that it meant freedom, choice was sold as a means to a risk-free peaceful existence where nothing moves if ever. It's idyllic and boring and unshakeable and solid and uninspiring and stale but peaceful. Peaceful because nothing moves until it dies, deteriorates, pacifies, expires. Freedom, on the other hand, runs free, wild, unattached, unanchored, ever-changing, slightly unsure, running on the very edge of what's certain and convinced. I find myself asking can I find peace by means of freedom? Because freedom cannot be found through peace, as it sits or bounces at the opposite end of peace. Peace feels as though it is the relinquishing of choice post decision-making. Freedom is an unending of choosing, and one that does not prohibit peace, as the door to peace remains a choice even for as long as you deny it.
Heinlein's quote remains a still and often unidentified truth. You cannot have both of those things simultaneously. But freedom is all the more auspicious because peace remains a feasible option, a hovering cloud of potential, even still if it's considered the backwards substitute, the one that erases all the progress that our ancestors fought to embrace, it is the freedoms that are the byproducts of such fight that have given me the opportunity to choose otherwise. To decide for what they may have longed to run away from, and eventually did, and not peacefully, but freely nonetheless. And then it begs the question; is youth meant for freedom as age is reserved for peace? Is youth for risk-taking when peace sits at the last legs of life, where death is more likely to meet us and creeps closer? Why are we asked to compromise our freedom early to lay the foundation of a peace that will be promised later? Why am I looking for peace now in my life instead of basking in my freedoms?
My freedoms. I have been unfree to decide my peace. I understand my version of peace only from afar. I look at it, measure it from the perspective of my right angled fingers, blurry in frame like a building in the distance I'm about to photograph. But I don't know what lies at the bottom of that peace, how its roots lay rest gripping the people above it. I have been denied the freedom to learn and experience what that peace really was. Today I fought for my freedom, through fog and fury, to find my peace. Perhaps in many ways, I was, in fact, fighting for peace. I found it, eventually. After spitting fire from my red and ruddy face I drove home in a rage. I sat in my car, palms glued to the steering wheel, hiccuping exasperated sobs. Everything stuck to me, tears, sweat, and snot. I walked myself upstairs, washed the ware from my hair, sat in a silent distraction and made my way to the kitchen to eat exactly 7 bites of cold salsa and bread. I laid a throw on a patchy square of grass and listened to my Vietnamese neighbour's fight with each other, perhaps about the same denial of choice. I pushed through the pages of a book I'm reading until I called defeat from the drum inside my head, beating saliently against my temples. I drugged myself until I fell asleep. I found a peace of sorts, after having fought for my freedom. Although I realised I wasn't totally free from unrest. The peace was not pure, and the freedom not unconditional nor explicit. I was not free from feeling unpeaceful, yet due to the resistance of both, I found myself floating atop a frothy battle. I lost and won, bottled at the expense of each other. I am on both either side of the caged prisons of freedom and peace.
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