Image via Wikipedia I was born inside the gates with these words on.My childhood was spent with others who knew these words to be the only ones that counted.
At an early age I started working in order that I too would experience freedom.
In my late teens I started to become ill with having to work the only work that was around me to find the ever elusive freedom.
By my early thirties I was incapacitated by my illness and ended up far from freedom in a world of my own within the walls in which the gates sat.
Whilst growing up I have met many people who were also born inside the gates.
Such a fund of knowledge to be had, to be shared, by all of us.
One thing I have noticed… the walls and the gates, and the infrastructure concerned with the walls and the gates, seem to be what most of the people within the walls and the gates are working for.
There are these places I can see from afar that are linked to this place by never ending streams of workers and their crafts. It seems that it is these places that work their magic on the walls and the gates. It seems that without these places the walls would crumble and the gates would fall and then freedom would become unattainable...
From the beginnings of my life I have snuck out of the gates by doing things that obviously aren’t work but seem to give me the thing I later learned to know as freedom.
It is only recently that I have realised that for most of my life I have been having to struggle to work in order to gain freedom - in order to gain the freedoms I found by not working but by just doing the things that used to make me happy as a child.
Now, at the ripe old age of nearly fifty I find myself living in sight of the gates and their statement and I am wondering.
If I am not working (whether through illness or that other thing I do that is not work) what am I if I am not free?
I know there are other gates with other slogans with other crowds of people inside who live by the slogans they read on their gates but isn’t there somewhere that is without these constraints?
Why is it that I see freedom as a place that has no walls or gates?
Say, a world like the one world that I do live on.
But, utilizing the one life that I know I do have.
Not waiting to be able to work in order to be free.
Not having to be well in order to be free.
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