Are We Really Free?
A lunchtime conversation that wouldn’t leave me alone
Today I had an interesting conversation with a colleague over lunch.
We were talking about someone we know who recently moved back to his home country with his family, after years of building a life abroad. And we found ourselves stuck on the same question. How does a person decide to do that? How do you pack up a life you have spent a decade arranging, and start from scratch somewhere else?
The first thing that comes to mind is always the kids. If they are very young, you tell yourself it will be alright, they’ll adjust, they won’t even remember. If they are older, the calculation gets harder. School. Friends. The quiet little world they have built without you noticing.
Then we talked about the other kind of people. The ones who just move. Job offer in another city, sure, let’s go. New country, why not. They make it look easy. Almost suspicious how easy. And we found ourselves asking, half-jokingly, half not, do they just care less? Are they more confident that things will work out? Or do they know something we don’t?
Sitting with it longer, I think the answer might be about where we started.
If you grow up in a place of scarcity, where everything you have was earned the hard way and could disappear if you blinked, you learn, very young, to hold on. To stability. To familiar streets. To the job, the house, the people who know your name. Letting go isn’t a philosophy for us. It’s a luxury.
Maybe it’s easier for people who grew up in abundance. When you have always had enough, the next thing doesn’t feel like a gamble. It feels like the next thing.
So we cling. To the house. To the neighbourhood. To the school the kids have settled into. To the parents who, even from far away, we want to make sure are doing okay, emotionally and financially. There is a quiet pleasure in feeling rooted somewhere, with someone. In recognising the cashier at the grocery store. In knowing which dentist not to go to. These are not small things. They are how a life feels like a life.
But then the uncomfortable question creeps in.
Is this attachment, or is this a cage?
I’m not sure anymore. Maybe holding on is love, and maybe it is fear wearing love’s clothes. Maybe the people who move easily aren’t braver than us, just less heavy. Or maybe they are missing something we have, and we don’t realise it is a gift until we try to put it down.
I don’t have an answer. I’m still chewing on it.
But the question stays with me, the kind that doesn’t go away just because lunch ended.
Are we really free? Or are we just very comfortable in our chains?