Setting Each Other Free

When did you last help someone to break free of a locked-up life?

Photo by Pranab Debnath on Unsplash

Life is so full of things you can do! Things you can learn, or learn about, and things you can actually start doing with your hands and your brain – if only…

We often feel tied up by traditions and obligations, or restrained by not having the correct background, not enough money, or whatever seems to be the barrier to release out full potential.

But we all think about it. We all want to break free of some of the obligations, and break into something new and exciting.

So, what keeps us from doing it?

I hate to say it, but it is true – you are the reason! And me, and all of us. We prevent each other from taking that first step into something that could become a great new direction of someone’s life – and even a life-saver in the longer run.

When my mother was at her end, dying from cancer and having only a short time left to live, she asked me why we didn’t like her singing? She always wanted to sing for us when we were children, and have wanted to do so also later, but we have always stopped her by theatrically holding our hands for our ears and shouting “stop, stop!”

Why did we do that? She thought herself that she was singing well, she explained, but obviously we didn’t?

It hit me hard, because she actually did sing well. And I had no idea how that immature behavior had entered our life, but it had obviously plagued her throughout her life. Absolutely sad, I must say, and I regret deeply that we didn’t support her in what mattered to her.

Many years before that, when I was still a child, my father, who has been to school for some years and even got an education – as the only one from his family – he had never learned any other language than his native Danish, and I don’t think that he had ever been encouraged to do it either, but he then decided to start learning German. All of the people around him, when he grew up, didn’t see “learning” as a thing to do, so they had probably been mocking any attempt to do it – like those same people have done with me and everybody else, as far as I could see, later in their lives.

There was a course, I think arranged by the company he worked in, after work, once per week, or something like that, and when he came home after the first evening, we asked him what he had learned? He then bravely said “guten Abend”, meaning “good evening” – and we laughed, and laughed. The first time ever, in his life, he had said anything in a foreign language, he was laughed out of it again.

I am not sure if he ever went there again, but he didn’t complete the course, and he never picked up the idea again. And we kept saying “guten Abend” and laughing every time that story came up.

Like my mother’s singing, my father’s language learning didn’t meet any support from their own family. Probably not from anyone else, either, because this anti-supportive behavior was typical for the place where I grew up.

As I think back now, we never supported any development of each other. We rather tried to stop each other from doing anything that could bring any of us a bit forward – making them touch and taste any dream they might have had.

This was such a negative environment, holding all of us back from any attempt on making any of our dreams come true.

Now, being much older, and having been away from this for many years, I can only look back at it with sadness and dismay. I can’t at all support that kind of behavior anymore, and I wonder why I could as a child. I feel deeply sorry for the dreams I have participated in killing. And for the dreams of my own, that the others managed to kill.

Therefore, probably, I am so focused these days on examining what ties up people and what allows them to feel free.

I understand that lots of people didn’t have that same childhood, and even then, in the town I grew up, there were some of the other children who were supported by their parents in most of what they wanted to do. And I suppose some of them lived in families where they all supported each other, even though I don’t have many specific memories about such support taking place. I honestly remember our childhoods as being a lot more about doing things on our own, not so much about being supported by anyone. But it could be me, only, who saw it this way, of course, since that was the kind of life I knew.

I sometimes think about what could have happened if we back then had had a different kind of view on learning and personal development, about dreams and freedom, and the need to express one self.

My mother would have been happy about singing, and we would have enjoyed listening to it, or been singing with her, perhaps. We wouldn’t have considered music to be something outside of our lives but rather something that made up part of its foundation. My father would have been able to watch TV and actually understand what they said, and we would probably have traveled more, because he wouldn’t feel restricted and shy when facing people who spoke a different language. I would have played the piano, the tin whistle, and probably many other instruments, and I would have painted and written and learned languages.

If only we had not stopped each other from doing what was actually good to do.

A way of moving forward from that trauma, is to compensate, or even over-compensate, later in life. This, of course, seeing no understanding from people who weren’t there and didn’t grow up with that same level of restrictions.

Sharing thoughts like these could possibly also help some others who can recognize some of it – from their own lives, or from others’, and it could be that some of us, you, me and who ever will read this, can see a way to inspire those who seem to be restricted in their dreams or attempts to develop their lives.

Maybe you have already done that. By induction, perhaps, without doing anything explicitly, but just being who you are – for others to be inspired by. Or maybe knowingly, rescuing someone from a situation that would otherwise haunt them for the rest of their life.

No matter the current status: tomorrow is another day, and that could be the day where you will do that for someone. Yourself, perhaps? Someone close to you? Or someone you haven’t even met yet but will start looking for?

Freedom is such a thing we hardly even think about, when we have it, but it can be the best gift you could ever give to someone who is missing it. The understanding and support of some or just someone in the surroundings is often all it takes.

What is holding you back?