“To be free is often to be lonely.”

I’m always struck by this line in W. H. Auden’s tribute to Sigmund Freud.

We’re profoundly enmeshed in a social matrix even before we’re born, and as soon as we enter the world of language we’re faced with the task of mapping our experience of the world onto the shared medium of words.

But something is always lost in translation.

If we wish to be understood (and oh, how we do), we must strike a compromise and fit ourselves into the same worn phrases as everybody else. You know what I mean?

Such a phrase is devoid of value except as a bridge affording the speaker a sense of security through connection. But nobody ever knows what we mean — not really. Not the truth that exists for us prior to its utterance. Poetry comes close, of course.

However, we’re usually so quick to take refuge in the shared colloquial phrases.

We’re far more comfortable being understood-ish than we are being alone.

It’s a dreadful thing to be alone, and I mean that in its most concrete sense. We’re often full of dread when we’re alone. In such a state we’re reminded of the stark fact that nobody is able to figure this out for us. But there’s a promise to be found in such an experience.

We’re left free to live by our own standards.

We aren’t bound by the hand-me-downs of previous generations.

We aren’t tethered to the same rules, not necessarily.

Remember: what is inherited are the guidelines for not dying in that world, back then. It’s only to the degree that that world is similar to the one in which we now find ourselves that those guidelines are of any use. To the degree that those worlds differ, we can no longer rely on those guidelines.

So each of us must occasionally cast off those ties and determine for ourselves the sort of world in which we live and the sort of behaviors that are most efficacious here and now. Free from the historical restrictions, we are free to create a different future.

But you know by now the cost of such freedom: to be free is often to be lonely.

Originally published on The Ecosomatics Institute blog