Practice Makes (Ideal) Freedom
Morning Thoughts #46
See professional ballet dancers, whose movements seem at once to be both so orderly and free. When they perform, it is not unpracticed chaos that takes the stage. And when improvised movements join the performance, they pair with practice as their partner. When they allow themselves to be led, they are led beautifully. Freedom and order dancing together can make for such beautiful sights when order is leading the dance!
How different today's world seems when we step out into it! It is as if most of its actors have lost pre-performance anxiety, resulting in an increasingly unpracticed world. The critics have been brushed off, and the art of living has become a popular art, no longer subject to learned judges who are now dismissed as pretentious and unfashionable for prattling on about the potential for elevated tastes. If the world remains a stage, it has increasingly become a bastion for amateur actors. What makes a beautiful performance? It is the feeling and ability honed through arduous and often unseen dedication. Freedom should be the affect, not the starting premise of our life’s performance. If we begin with freedom, very likely nothing will be honed. When there are too many options, there is never enough time to decide. The narrowest paths often lead furthest!
If our lives are to progress, something must get us moving, whether it is an internal engine, attached horses, or something else entirely. Something must confine, compel, and dictate a path to follow. This something can be comprised of outward or inward forces or a combination of both. Woe to those whose only goal is to escape the demands of the outside world, only to find that once they are successful, they have no inward demands to compensate for that loss.
Friends, removing the seeming chains of outward responsibilities is not a gain of free time if you have no corresponding inward drives to use as replacements. You become like a spacecraft flung out of orbit into the vast reaches of deep space. It is better to maintain an orbit around some ideal, some goal. Be like the Earth, which never directs itself at the life-giving sun but is also never done with it either. One especially sunny, verdant summer does not negate life's need for the next. Make your goals into suns! The path forward is an orbit! Remember, only a fool would attempt a manned mission to the sun!
Friends, be wary of too much freedom! Would Earth's prospects really be improved if it were a wild asteroid instead? Yes, the Earth makes a worthy model to follow, but do not orbit it either. Instead (I say it again!), become like the Earth and find the gravitational field of a worthy sun that might even start to grow life within you! Rather than merely orbiting it, I suggest you dance yourself around and around it, joyous because you have found a path definite enough to allow for the degree of practice that leads to real freedom, that is the idealized kind.