From Ran Prieur: When you begin to get free, you will get depressed. It works like this: When you were three years old, if your parents werent too bad, you knew how to play spontaneously. Then you had to go to school, where everything you did was required. The worst thing is that even the fun activities, like singing songs and playing games, were commanded under threat of punishment. So even play got tied up in your mind with a control structure, and severed from the life inside you. If you were rebellious, you preserved the life inside you by connecting it to forbidden activities, which are usually forbidden for good reasons, and when your rebellion ended in suffering and failure, you figured the life inside you was not to be trusted. If you were obedient, you simply crushed the life inside you almost to death. Freedom means youre not punished for saying no. The most fundamental freedom is the freedom to do nothing. But when you get this freedom, after many years of activities that were forced, nothing is all you want to do. You might start projects that seem like the kind of thing youre supposed to love doing, music or writing or art, and not finish because nobody is forcing you to finish and its not really what you want to do. It could take months, if youre lucky, or more likely years, before you can build up the life inside you to an intensity where it can drive projects that you actually enjoy and finish, and then it will take more time before you build up enough skill that other people recognize your actions as valuable.
Posted on: Sat, 13 Sep 2014 15:06:33 +0000
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