"Freedom" from Wayside School is Falling Down

Louis Sachar is great. The Wayside School books are written for children, but the writing is excellent.

In this story, Myron sees a bird outside of his classroom window, and realizes that the bird is free, while Myron, trapped in the disciplined confines of elementary school, is not.

Inspired, Myron doesn't follow his classmates up to class when the bell rings after lunch, but instead goes down to the dark, spooky basement of the school. There he finds two men, one bald and one with a mustache, who ask him why he's there, and when he replies that he just wanted to be free, they ask him if he wants to be free or safe.

They give him a contract, written in a foreign language, to sign if he wants to be free. He signs it, then goes back upstairs and sits on the floor of his classroom, where he isn't scolded for not following the rules.

The choice between freedom and safety isn't a new idea, obviously. But this story encapsulates it beautifully and simply. Myron sees freedom, then ventures into the dark, spooky unknown: the basement. He signs a contract that he doesn't understand, and only then, after all this uncertainty, is he free. Although we can assume there will be more uncertainty to come.

For me, recently I haven't even realized how trapped I've become. It isn't the bell ringing to tell me I'm late, or my name written on the board under DISCIPLINE, or report cards, or a list of class rules. These are all simple, clear restraints. The more difficult restraints to break are the invisible ones, the ones that we often create ourselves.

My restraints are my job, my girlfriend, but most importantly my own mind (which intensifies these first two restraints). I have more free time than most people, but I have depressingly few ideas of what I want to do with it. At my job, I have the specter of CCTV watching over me in my classroom, but really, I'm free to teach my own classes as long as I cover the material. I trap myself simply by telling myself I shouldn't do things, which has lead to me not even being able to come up with new ideas.

In many ways I think I want to be safe more than free. I want to have the safety of knowing I'm making the right decisions. I want to have the safety of people's approval. I want to have the safety of knowing the future. I want to have the safety of knowing what I want.

No one likes to feel trapped, but how to we continue to live on without having anything to funnel us towards a direction?