As I contemplate the meaning of my past life and the life I have today, I am forever realizing the meaning of the word independence. For it is not some description found in a dictionary of what it means to be let loose or alone from control. It is not some title to a holiday or meaning from a historical event. It is rather an inner feeling from the heart that sometimes must be fully meditated on to value what all it encompasses. The pure essence of knowing that your life is no longer in the hands of a person, or should I say persons, who would tell you the way to speak and the way to live. Not to the simple parts of life that are seen, but to the more complex portions that are hidden and yet controlled by the guilt that was once, the life, the religion.
Perhaps I am seeing it to deep, but sometimes I will sit alone in a room and look at the small details of what is close to me and just think about the space that exist around myself and those objects. About that distance of nothing that is so control by our own mental thought of how to pass our day through these empty spaces. How to see that the air is not just what we breathe, but even what we feel and know to be the part of our life that we can either inhale with the beauty of freedom to do what we please or to breath in with the sour passing of guilt of wondering who is looking across this emptiness to our outer character of existence to see what they think we are and what they think we are not. So much space to learn to move within, so much air to learn to taste for the first time. Yet in all my thinking, it is so amazing to realize how it was always there. Only lacking in the color that true independence now allows one to see it in.
I think of the founding fathers of the United States, and that freedom they spoke about, and how it was not something that actually changed the look of the land. How in many ways it was simple words on a paper that expressed the views of a people to break free from what they did not see as acceptable. Yet in the passing of these thoughts in paper from one party to another, it was not the words that changed a nation and formed a unique path of history. It was rather the inner being of the people to realize what these words meant to them as a person, and to act upon in their own path of life to make something of it. To taste not the thought of another man, but rather to feel the independence that that thought brought to them from within their very soul. Breathing the air of freedom, on land that remains the same, only now through the eyes of a person in control of the way in which they will live within it.
Perhaps to take this large historical event and to compare it to the thinking and emotions of what life now holds for us away from the control of another, is arrogant and considered misplaced. Yet in all that life has taught me, it has shown me one true point that I have learned so well. The miles that we travel in this world, mean more to the one traveling it, then it does to the one watching you walk away. For only when you take the time, and effort to make the passage. Do you truly understand the value of the journey worth taken. It can be said that the journey is one of discouragement, or even of pain, yet with these comes the value and the complex thought, now made simple.
The thought to be able to sit in a room, stair at the things that are around you and see value, not in the objects, or textures before us, but rather in the freedom of the independence that one now feels to travel through the emptiness that surrounds us. With the open mind to wonder what it hold. To experience not the touch of life, but the emotional connection, so often lost. For independence is, at its least to even its most .... YOURS TO LIVE!