Degrees of Freedom
Growing up in the suburban American professional and entrepreneurial hothouse, a social order that produces some of the most fortunate people in the world, can give a unique view of the different zonal borders of life. Somewhat proving my own point, I might invoke the image of a golf course: green, fairway, rough, sand, and water.
Denis Leary might define the green as:
I’ve got an average house,
With a nice hardwood floor.
And my wife, and my job, my kids, and my car,
My feet on my table,
And a Cuban cigar.
I’m inclined to think it’s generally more about financial security heading later into life. The economic value and highly favorable odds of the system can hardly be questioned.
It’s still not the easiest way for everyone. Everyone knows people who, actively or passively, bounced off the fairway and into the rough.
I can picture the face that people get - the face that I get - when we hear about someone wandering off the way. It’s the same feeling you get when you find out how much a saved dollar is worth fifty years down the road. In fact, chances are, that’s the kind of future you’re watching the person walk away from.
On the other hand, in one of my favorite Rush songs it is said about suburbs, “Nowhere is the misfit or the dreamer so alone.”
Living abroad and traveling have expanded my understanding of my own little golf course. I joke about my ABCDE’s of personalities living abroad: Academics, Burnouts, Crazies, Do-gooders, and Expats. It’s interesting because you can see a much more polarized and wider spectrum of people when in these conditions.
Life is (thankfully, for me) much narrower within the suburban environment. The sand trap is probably as stinging as a misdemeanor, and a job problem could probably land you deep in the drink.
What description of the rough would you get from somebody who grew up in a neighborhood you wouldn’t consider safe to drive through? How about from a Rwandan subsistence farmer?
Our rug friend Suat once said something to the effect of, “These women [who make rugs in Eastern Turkey and Kurdistan] are free. You have your life and you are free to do what you want, but these women are really free.”
Part of freedom is being able to alter your life and fate in whatever way you wish. I see no reason to be ashamed or particularly proud of one’s own set of borders, but awareness of them makes us all better people.
People do need to realize that flimsy, symbolic expeditions into the wild begin looking like country club newsletters when they are funded by a publisher’s book advance. And just dipping your toe in the water forces you to do a lot of imagining about what the pool is really like. Contentment and success are not easily mapped from one scenario to another.
When I got my drivers license, the first thing I wanted to do was jump into the truck and drive west. I told a classmate (who could have been the grounds-keeper at my little country club) this, and he looked at me like I was crazy. I couldn’t describe it at the time (and wouldn’t have wanted to), but it was really about realizing the newly-expanded scope of experience that had just come available.
So, for those of us with lives that support it, as you’re driving up to an intersection one day look out to the west and imagine driving that way. Imagine the past-due bill notices starting to pile in, then the eviction or foreclosure, then the letters from the IRS. Watch the watchmaker’s craft of mechanisms that prop up our lives and define our order begin to close in upon themselves, and keep driving, sailing, riding, and walking until you’re a subsistence farmer in northwest China or a nomad in Turkmenistan.
Look up and see the same burning sun in the sky that was getting cancelled out by the air conditioning in your car, and try for a moment to even begin to envision how big, deep, and wide our world is. You won’t succeed, because no one ever has.