Wednesday, June 1, 2022

There is Freedom and then there is Chaos

 Where is the boundary between Freedom and Chaos?

The question I'm asking is when does Freedom become Chaos in certain people's minds.

I can go back, for example, to my own life when my parents told me: "You can be anything you want to be! You can go to college and be anything!"

I personally found both a comfort and a terror to being told this.

One the one hand I had the opportunity I realized to do anything I wanted with my life. Though my father was a valedictorian of his senior High School Class in 1934 in Seattle, his father didn't allow him or his two brothers to go to college (but he let both their sisters go to college to meet college men) and one of them did and got married to him.

So, my parents offering me literally "Any future I wanted" on one level was amazing but what if I wasn't sure what future I actually wanted?

This is what I found true of myself at the time. What did I want to do?

Well. At about 14 I wanted to be an underwater photographer like Jacques Cousteau of France who traveled the world taking underwater pictures of undersea creatures and stuff like this. Before that I wanted to be a pilot either for an airline or a Bush Pilot in Alaska. However, my father made me promise not to become a pilot because his youngest brother died in a plane crash and this devastated his whole family in 1942. And in some ways the family never recovered from this (any of them).

So, my father made me promise not to get my pilot's license until after he died so he wouldn't have to lose me too.

And because the men in my family including me have all been very bold this was actually wise for my father to have made me promise him this.

There is a statement about this: 

"There are old pilots and there are bold pilots but there are NO old bold pilots."

And this is true.

The point of all this is: "When does freedom become chaos and just lead to more deaths?"

This of course is a rhetorical question being asked so that more people stay alive and not die before their time.



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