Four More Freedoms
In response to this week’s prompt: Freedom
In one of the most famous speeches of his Presidency, Franklin D. Roosevelt proclaimed all people in the world deserved the right to enjoy four freedoms: The Freedom of Speech, The Freedom of Worship, The Freedom from Want, and The Freedom from Fear. They are the basis of the United Nations’ Declaration of Human Rights. Seventy years later, most of the world is still waiting for one or all of those to happen.
The only place most of us are truly free is in our mind. The mind is where we have no limitations, boundaries, or constraints. Our mind is not limited by the laws of physics. Our mind is not limited by finances, morals, distance, reality, or anything else. We are free to fantasize, create, travel, and anything else we desire. We even have aids for this. We have books, we have movies, and, if you are reading this, we have the entire internet to inspire us. If we keep this all in our mind, we are free from everything, as Diana so wonderfully worded in her prompt article.
When we look at the outer “real” world, things get more complicated. Virtually all of us have some constraints on us. They might be physical, depending on what we would like to do and what our body will allow. This one can be bent but often not broken. It could be financial. I am sure many of us would love to travel at any time we wished to anywhere we wished. This too, with time and financial planning, can be bent but often not broken. This could be geographical/political. Depending on where we were born, there could be more or less freedom of movement.
I wish to talk about four new Freedoms we all should have in our lives:
1) Freedom to Grow.
Most people do not like change. They do not like it in their life and they do not like it in people they have in their lives. If you start to change because you are growing, you often get resistance from people in your life. They are concerned about their happiness and you may no longer be contributing to it. We should not ever have to worry about that.
2) Freedom from Judgement.
Face it, we all make judgements. We make judgements on everything, from music, food, drinks, clothing, and virtually anything else. However, it is not okay to judge other people’s life choices. We can choose to remove them from our life. We can choose to limit interaction. I do have a qualifier on this freedom. If someone is doing something to hurt themselves or others, feel free to step in. My actions have saved some people in my life. Some were angry at me for it at the time. It was, however, of out caring and in some cases actually saved their life. If someone is too drunk to drive, tackle them. Take their keys away and hide them.
3) Freedom from Imperfections.
No human being is perfect. Either the Divine One has a great sense of humor or is not perfect either. At any given moment in time, we are not going to be able to change many things. They include but are not limited to our age, our sex, our sexual orientation, our height, medical conditions that we live with both physical and mental, our basic size and shape, inner and outer strength, and countless other things. We need to grasp our abilities, not our real or perceived limitations.
4) Freedom from Labels.
Possibly the most important of these new freedoms. How much of the wrong in the world can be traced to labels. Religion, nationality, gender, sexual orientation, race, socio-economic situation, fat, skinny, dumb, beautiful, ugly, rich, poor, educated, and so many others. We all know that these do not make the worth of a human being. We all know that each of these can give someone an advantage or disadvantage depending on where they live. We all know amazing things have been invented and created by people without even a high school diploma. Every other one of these labels is superficial also. Greatness is found inside all of these labels. Human Beings of all labels have done magnificent things.
We only have the power to control ourselves. We, therefore, have the ability to offer these freedoms to people we know. We have the power to rate people on who they are inside. We have the ability to treat them as equals. We have the ability to treat everyone as a fellow human being with all the rights and privileges we wish for ourselves. It doesn’t matter how we are treated to do this.
In a final message of synchronicity, every major religion as well as Native Americans and Sacred Earth believers have a similar Golden Rule worded slightly differently but having the same meaning: Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.