Hospitals, Planes, and Freedom

I’m writing from sunny Miami, having arrived here two days ago from the bitter cold that marks January in the Northeast. As is often the case for me, my tears began to flow as soon as I settled into my window seat on the plane and allowed the poetry contained in my ipod’s playlists to dance with my imagination.

Travel seems to bring me perspective. Once up in the air and moving away from home and work, my mind clears out. I feel space opening up within me; and in that space, thoughts, fantasies, and memories come rolling in, one after another. I flashed back to the time I left my home for graduate school in Pittsburgh, and how leaving my nephew who was about three at the time evoked an ache in my heart that I had not felt prior, nor since.

I laughed, almost out loud, as I later recalled my sister’s telling of a story that involved my father’s very appalling and bigoted comment to her when she called him in a desperate moment from her first home away from home, a college dorm room many, many miles away. How could this be funny to me, I wondered as I found some delight in the memory? Am I not the person who stands up to that sort of bigotry? Shouldn’t I be more responsible than a person who laughs at such a story? What I was in touch with, I believe, and what evoked the internal laughter was the tenderness of my father’s response—tenderness toward my sister, even as it was housed in a prejudicial statement of hate toward others. It was as though the perspective brought to me through travel held space for the compassion I experienced, which was at least equal to whatever outrage I felt.

This is what I have noticed during these first two days of a warm January week: I don’t have to be anything here. The simple feat of being transported from a very familiar place to one less so has the effect of the dissolution of my ego—at least one of the outer layers of it. In other words, I am no longer attached to a certain identity, to those beliefs that I am this, or ought to be that. And without that attachment, I respond spontaneously, meaning that my responses arise in the moment, unconditioned by my past history, future expectations, and the attachment to identity that these can create.

This is freedom.

The other place I have experienced this is the hospital. On two different occasions in my life, I have experienced extended stays (a week or more) within hospitals. I remember a similar feeling of freedom then, even as I was more confined than at any other time in my life. The confinement, though, and being removed from the familiar routines and obligations I call life, invited this detachment from ego. Then, as now, I had the choice of listening to my ipod all day long, getting lost in my thoughts, and not being anyone in particular.

At those times when I am feeling most stuck, or trapped, in my life, I’ve noticed fantasies of being hospitalized creeping in. It’s the freedom of not having to be anyone in particular. I realize now, that is what I’m truly craving in those moments. And experiencing that freedom here in Miami reminds me that a hospitalization is not the only way of achieving such!