Independence Day…This is one of the most celebrated holidays in USA. People of all ages and all walks of life mingle in the streets all over the States to celebrate what started by becoming free from the British tutelage and has evolved in a popular day of drinking, barbecuing and boasting… I have to admit that Independence day never really got my full attention except by its much dreaded drunken crowds mobbing my neighborhood or the hazard brought about with fireworks… It’s not that I do not love Independence, mind you!
I am fiercely in love with it, actually.
So much so that I am all for celebrating it every day, not only one day per year! But independence in my mind, is the dominion of myself over every decision and every action taken in my daily life. Independence for me, is the freedom to learn, to observe, to experience, to acquire the tools I need to approach any situation, any circumstance in my life from different angles and to refine my vision until I can position myself and orient my living in the direction that is in accordance with my soul.
Independence is the most cherish tool that permits me to be me.
And to do it without depending on any validation, any habit, any preconception brought to me by my upbringing, my peers, or the society at large, unless I have challenged them in the private study of my mind.
In my vision of it, independence comes with its twin sister: responsibility. There is no independence if not in the light of effects and consequences. There is no independence if my choices, my votes, my decisions, my likings, my behaviors, are tainted with the delusion of separation and blurred with the fog of mainstream cultivated mediocrity.
There is no independence if “common sense” is pounded into me, trying to make me see my tribe, my town, my country as better or more worthy of my love than any other, or separated from one another. Let’s not forget that common sense is only that: common. And there is no break through, no invention, no great discovery, no evolution in the comfortable boundaries of commonness. There is no independence if I cultivate the delusion of independence as a goal for a living creature, other than in independent thinking.
Research has proved for quite a while now, that all species that last and thrive on Earth are species PRACTICING COOPERATION. The myth of the survival of the fittest, strongest, dominant ones is long gone… though not in most human beliefs, yet.
Independence is a paradox, if you look at the fact that cooperation is our best chance to subsist and flourish. Independence is really useful and at its best when used liberally in proportion to our awareness that we are not alone, and not separated. It becomes our best asset in fact when used individually within the frame of the global good.
I’d like to question the quality of independence in a day spent by most indulging and catering to their most common dependencies to food, alcohol and recreational drugs, basically muddying the brilliance of their mind with whatever they choose to dull its edge, to blur the vision, to keep on the charade… What independence is there, truth be told, in planting flags on our lawn one day and going back to the grind stone without really loving or choosing what we do with each day of our one precious life ?
I do want to celebrate Independence, for real, as in a quiet jubilation, a gentle exhilaration shared with all free spirits of the world, knowing that not only I am a manifestation of Life, an embodied sentient being encompassing so much more than I have been taught, and that nobody will ever be the master of my own mind, but me. I want to rejoice in the knowledge of my ability to learn, to discover, to experiment, to test and to taste, to refine my own skills, to understand my motivations, to tame my lesser desires and to cultivate my uniqueness in beauty. I want to share my adoration for Life, my reverence for the astounding intelligence all around me in this Universe, and to evoke in others the same impetus for self mastery as what moves me forward…
This July 4th I invite you to become untethered and to leap into the unchartered wonder of your own Oneness, for your own delight and the greater good of the whole world.
Happy Independence Day!
More later…