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If I Lose it All, At Least I'll be Free

Our twenties are spent rising early.

We dutifully treat '5pm knock off' as a quaint relic of the past, waving our managers goodnight as they whisk past us to pick up kids, meet wives and enjoy dinner around the table. On we tap, our fingers nimble at our keyboards. Simultaneously those fingers message workmates about after-work drinks and later manipulate chopsticks to pluck dumplings from bowls placed in laps in front of the TV.

"Gritting your teeth, you hold onto me. It's never enough, I'm never complete."

At night our dreams are coloured with interviews that need arranging, ideas that need pitching, deadlines that need meeting and features that need rewriting. Our mornings are a flurry of Weetbix and showers and hair dryers and ironing and makeup and traffic. Our phones are bleeping before we hit our desks, deadlines are coming and lunch breaks are going. Contacts get built and ideas knocked down. Egos are bruised and dreams are realised.

"Hoping for more and wishing for less. When I didn't care, was when I did best."

Restless, we enjoy weekends of sleep peppered with parties and coffee dates and show rehearsals and personal projects.

We have so much to do and we relish it.

Now we have come so far, does the thought of letting go of what was once so important, beckon us with the thought that we might actually feel 'free'?

"I'm desperate to run, I'm desperate to leave. If I lose it all, at least I'll be free."

I lost myself and gained the world when my son tumbled into it.

The two years since has contained a dialogue of tension between hanging onto the things that I thought identified me and giving myself up to a deliciously new, all-consuming way of life that I am called to.

One by one I am prising my fingers from the grip of my perceived identity - my job, my career, my professional reputation.

This is not me throwing in the towel, this is me realising that my work doesn't shape me.

"Somebody take me back to the days before this was a job, before I got paid.
Before it ever mattered what I had in my bank. Yeah, back when I was tryin' to get a tip at Subway. And back when I was rappin' for the hell of it. But nowadays we rappin' to stay relevant."

One of the people I care about most, my husband, has enabled me to experience this 'freedom'. This is a blessing. But it's not something he can have in the same way as me. He has dreams and dreams of dreams. And he toils. I think of him and his endeavours and I count our blessings - our home, our cushy lifestyle, our travels. If we lost it all, I would like to think we would not be any less happy. If we lost it all - the responsibilities, the pressure, the obligation to squeeze more of the juice out of life, if all we had was our family - each other. Would we then 'be free'?

"We used to play pretend, give each other different names,
We would build a rocket ship and then we'd fly it far away,
Used to dream of outer space but now they're laughing at our face,
Saying, "Wake up, you need to make money."

In this season, I'm not entirely convinced. But it's a nice thought, isn't it?

"Wish we could turn back time, to the good ol' days, when our momma sang us to sleep but now we're stressed out."



*Inspirational lyrics were pinched from: Broods, Free; B.O.B, Airplanes; Twenty One Pilots, Stressed Out.

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