On Freedom, and the Future
A reflection on the entanglements of freedom and responsibility, by way of Jim Collins, in his book, “What to Make of a Life”.
Freedom does not mean the absence of responsibilities. Freedom means you get to choose your responsibilities.”
I just finished reading Jim Collins’ book, “What to Make of a Life,” in which he rephrases and shares a definition of freedom he first heard from Nobel Prize winning author, Toni Morrison, in an interview that emerged amid the research for the Collins’ book.
Many years ago, a friend and cycling teammate of mine - also a certified executive coach - offered me a handful of free coaching sessions. Early among those was an exercise to hone in on your personal values, first identifying 20 from a list of 100+ named values, then distilling down to 10, 5, 3, and finally two. The idea was that these two values were the axis about which the choices of your life should spin.
One of my two was freedom.
“But what does this vaunted ‘freedom’ mean?” asked former Chief Justice, Beverley McLachlin, in an article published in The Globe & Mail newspaper in February 2022.
My answer, in the context of that coaching exercise, conducted at a time before my stepdaughters entered my life, would probably have been framed in near-absolute terms - that is, as the absence of - freedom from - constraint by most any outside influence.
Years after my coaching session - and written four and a half years of accelerating, compounding social fractures before the day we currently inhabit - Justice McLachlin offered an alternative definition, grounded in the Constitution of the land now called Canada:
“Freedom is not absolute. We live in a social matrix, where one person’s exercise of freedom may conflict with another person’s exercise of freedom. Section 1 of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms states this plainly. The Charter gives Canadians a bundle of rights and freedoms. But it prefaces them with this caution – these rights and freedoms, precious as they are, are not absolute. …
The bottom line is that you can’t use your freedoms in a way that unreasonably conflicts with or affects the freedoms of other people. The freedoms guaranteed by the Charter stop where they harm others.
With freedom comes responsibility.”
Our (fragile?) gift as Canadians is the Constitutionally-linked responsibilities we all (in theory) hold, in exchange for the rights and freedoms protected by the state. If we are more fortunate still, our freedoms expand - in forms including financial, capability, and choice - to allow us additional scopes of responsibilities we may choose.
The early-30s version of myself, holding that sheet of paper with the word “freedom,” underlined, circled, highlighted and starred - the regalia of winning the right to be one of my top-2 values - wouldn’t have yet conceived it that way.
He couldn’t have predicted that two decades later I would count my life’s greatest gift - it’s greatest freedom - to have been the opportunity to choose to share responsibility for the upbringing of two girls, now young women, one of them pictured here - to my love, in a classic pose genetically gifted from her mother - at dawn on the second day of our first, recent, backpacking trip together.
Standing at inflection points, might we look out and wonder: What further freedoms/responsibilities does the future offer me to choose?
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