A Different Kind of Freedom

French cancan dancers

There may be some pointers on how to BE FREE –the technique of it– but I haven’t come across a cogent essay on the subject. I am thinking there must be a different kind of freedom available as I ponder the ways society has me feeling quite unfree. This feeling is not healthy!

• Can’t do the work(play) I’d like to do, easily and without worry (even in “retirement.”)
• Can’t find, buy or grow the kind of food I want to eat easily.
• Can’t silence the din of media and Internet noise –their impact on me and my choices– whenever I want to.
• Can’t go to any holistic healer I’ve chosen to help me prevent dis-ease, fear or worry.
• Can’t patronize businesses owned by people like me because of a ghastly legacy of socioeconomic isms that permeate the communities.

What I know for sure is, I can’t continue to whine and complain and think anything will change. Being free is definitely different from that. 

My very first life coach told me I should remove “can’t” from my vocabulary. I responded, I can’t. Then I upgraded to I cannot.

There’s so much that is true, that I cannot be or do. Or so I thought.

It took a long time, but it dawned on me eventually that what is true is only a snapshot of the past. 

Health, lifestyle and enterprise freedoms are possible right now, and I cannot…okay, I will not look at the past to BE these freedoms.

Vintage cancan dancer drawing courtesy the Metropolitan Museum

All my Can’t’s and Cannots are like a cancan frenzy. Imagine a chorus line of ladies kicking their legs high in the air, and men in the audience drooling at what they can never have. Can’t have this and cannot have that. They thought the women were saying, You CAN! 

The cancan had its fleeting moment a hundred years ago plus. In the 1990s or maybe earlier, Shoprite Supermarket made a commercial out of a cancan theme song–to sell canned food.

Such is the perception of life that you can reduce the facts and what’s true to a dance of yesteryear, and to a marketing jingle.

It may be laughable, because it is only a dance. President Barak Obama said Yes We Can years ago and now many are crying….

How to BE FREE, the technique of it, may reside in looking at the past not to bemoan what can’t or cannot be or be done, but to create new, liberating thoughts and ways of thinking about it.

I feel better already. I’m constantly coaching the gal in the mirror towards freedom and just BEing.

–Rev. Niamo Nancy Muid