The Notion of being Free-Spirited

If something on this world was highly overrated, the notion of being free spirited is right up there. I have often times done things under the disguise of being free-spirited and later discovered I was being plain selfish and satisfying my own greed, ego, self interest or whatever. I was also under this impression for long that being free-spirited is not seeking help. Ah! what a trap to fall for!

Not that I’m extremely proud of it or have ever considered it to be cool, but only perhaps it has taken me longer than usual to understand the world around me and come to appreciate it. Better later than never I suppose. But of late what I have come to realize is, it ain’t just me who’d fell trap to it. What is ironic is how the entire notion of being free-spirited is ill-conceived. Most of us couldn’t really differentiate between being free-spirited and being selfish or sometimes even random. Is it free-spirited nature when you commit a crime because you want to do it? Is it free-spirited ideology when you pick on a religion and humiliate others because you think that is cool? Is it free spirited when you jump from a top of a building because you felt like doing it? Or you are just being insanely crazy and random?

Being free-spirited requires a lot of things from us. It requires us to not have contradictory beliefs. It requires us to be rational. Suppose you want to do X. There are a number of questions you have to ask yourself. Do you have a reason to do X? Does the fact constitute a reason for you to X? Is there a contradictory belief that constitutes for you to not do X? Even if one of these questions is not answered, you ought to think twice before subscribing to your all-so-cool free-spirited attitude. In short, its a simple reasoning question. If only your premise holds good, your conclusion (to be free-spirited) should follow.

Its not something we have acquired all of a sudden. We progressively grow into this as we age. We hear most kids complaining to their parents that its their life and they can take care of it. We hear people say “its my business”, when they get defensive about something. So having to take our own decisions is something we have been obsessed with for long. There is not a single person who wouldn’t cherish the power of decision making. So its always been there with us. What changed all of a sudden is not the insatiable hunger to just take our own decisions but the crazy obsession to make a point to the world around us that we are free-spirited and subsequently the appetite to crave for attention.

What most of us fail to realize is being free doesn’t mean we are not supposed to seek help. It tells us to be independent as well as to be co-dependent. Its never about the egoistic “I”, its always about the “I” and the collective “we” or the influence of “I” on the collective “We”. Hence, its more of a responsibility than comfort. There are not many ‘free-spirited’ thinkers in the world, not real ones. For us to grow into one, its not arrogance that’ll take us there, reasoning hopefully will.

No value embodiment lecture, this! I just had to get it outta me. Period.

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