Feeling Free

When I lived in New Brighton, a suburb of Christchurch, I saw a man by the name of Peter Donnelly doing something beautiful. He would make art out of a stretch of sand about 50m by 20. I first honestly thought he was doing it because he was homeless, and this is how he made money because there would be a hat on a mat at the bottom of his art for people to drop money into from the pier, from which people would view his art. It was really beautiful what he would do. Sometimes he would plan in advance what he would do. Sometimes he would plan nothing at all. Sometimes he would plan something, but do something entirely different.

His canvas was a stretch of sand freshly washed by the outgoing tide. It was prim and pristine for creating whatever he wanted. But he would only have 4 hours to finish his work before the incoming tide would clear his canvas again. Sometimes he would not finish what he wanted, but every time it was fascinating, both the finished product and the way he worked. When I saw him in the middle of 2008, he was on #872 and hoping to make it to 1,000.

This one was of particular interest to me. He titled it, Feeling Free, and I can still picture him making his motions with the details of the butterfly and the designs at the top. I was really curious what the story was behind it, so I asked him. (He's approachable once he's done.) He said that he hadn't been able to do any sand art for a couple weeks because of breathing problems he'd been having, but now that he was able to make it out, he was feeling free and expressed it in his art.

And what a happy fella he was when he did. He wasn't completely over his ailment, but he was enough to get out and do what he loved to do. I thought about his art when I again came to realize the importance of feeling free. We all find ourselves locked in to something at various points in our day and throughout our lives. But at those moments, we can also realize that we can feel quite free despite whatever lack of freedom we may be facing at the time. So, this is essentially an "it's all how you look at it" sort of thing.

However, it's also something that may require action. Donnelly, for example, probably would not have felt the same freedom if he hadn't taken the action of getting to the beach that day to do his art. Other freedoms may come from fluctuations in our lives, such as cutting ties with people we know, making new ties with people we meet, or developing stronger ties with people already in our lives. We are constantly making decisions, and sometimes we feel as though we choose one decision over another because we are tied to it. In reality though, we choose every decision we make. For example, we may feel obligated to go to some sort of family gathering, so we go. Now, some may not see the freedom in that, but it's there. We have the freedom to make family a priority in our lives, and so if we are to make a decision that makes us feel as though they aren't a priority, then we are essentially choosing them not to be a priority. Same with a career, in which you decide what the threshold is for what is being too little or too much of a commitment, relative to other commitments in life.

So, next time you're feeling tied down in a way that you think you may not wanna be tied down, whether with friends, family, work, or school, just realize the freedom that you had and still have in making the decision you've made. It's quite freeing.