Nostalgia and Freedom

Today I had a moment of nostalgia that I hadn't felt for some time. For the first time since I was a child, I suppose I'm on Summer break.

For the last several years, Summer carried with it a certain nostalgic element, but one that was still different. Much like the days of my youth, Summer meant finding some body of water to float around on or swim in. Summer meant much less time spent in my home and much more time out and about. Summer meant staying up late, spontaneity, and that peculiar sense of invigoration that's found during the cool of a Summer's day. The world bursts into shades of green, and that really stirs something up inside of me. The similarities end right about there. 

When I think about what my Summer's were truly like, I think about the raw potential that every day carried. By and large, each day was characterized because of a complete lack of an agenda. I never was involved in any camps, clubs, or extra-curriculars. Most days were simply spent at home, more or less alone. My folks would have their work and my brother, sister, and I would be left to fend for ourselves. We did plenty of TV watching and video gaming. We were also fortunate enough to live on five acres of land, largely surrounded by farm land. There were no neighborhood kids. There was nowhere to really go beyond out little familiar oasis. For all intents and purposes, we might as well have been the only people on earth until my mother came home around 4:30pm.

I suppose what I'm getting at is there was a degree of absolute freedom that you just can't typically gain access to. Due to our lack of agenda, our day wasn't confined to doing any particular thing, so we were free to do anything. Beyond that, there wasn't really anyone around to see or cast judgement on what we were doing. We were never up to anything nefarious. But I realize now, living in the city, living surrounded by neighbors, some no more than a couple of pieces of drywall away, that there's a certain social order of what is considered normative and what is not. As a child, I could wander around the same five acres all day, discovering little curiosities, attempting to build forts, ramps for my bike, catching tadpoles in the pond, or even just laying in the grass with my Gameboy or a book, trotting around barefoot. I could do all of those things without once being asked "what are you doing?" At least until 4:30pm. 

These days I feel like there is a double-restriction to that sense of absolute freedom. One of physical or tangible, the other is social perhaps. I have no real access to land. Definitely not land that I could legally try to alter or forage from. I don't even have grass that I can walk on with my bare feet. I can't plant plants in the ground, and our unit hardly gets enough light to sow seed in pots either. So much of that freedom is skimmed right off the top when you live on rented land. Beyond that physical restricted access to absolute freedom, I feel as though there's also a social restriction. What this really boils down to for me is that when you live in a place that lacks a high degree of privacy, there's a social temptation of sorts to maintain the status quo, to do what everyone else is doing for the sake of fitting in and to not draw attention to yourself. Maybe this is a product of my personality. I suppose as an introvert, I don't like to draw any more attention to myself than necessary. But the invisible script goes a little something like this: most people in my community are only ever really outside when they are heading out to, or heading in from their vehicles. There's not a whole lot of nature around here anyways I suppose, but the general use of the outdoor space here is as a median between vehicle and domicile, or a place to have a smoke. Balconies attached to units are 2 feet by 4 feet. Those are used for mostly for sitting on or standing on and looking around for a moment or enjoying a rare good breeze. There's nothing physically stopping me from going outside and doing something outside of these behavioral norms, but there's a social sense that it would just be a little weird to go sit outside the front door instead of sit out on the balcony. Or it would be strange to really get a close look at the areas where grass is growing to try to ID some of the plants growing naturally in this area. It would be strange to spend your time outside trying to harvest seed from plants that are finishing up their natural cycles. Even though I could physically do all of those things, I suppose, I can't for risk of it negatively impacting a sort of unseen, uncalculated social score of normality. It's all a big component of why I hate living in the city, and why I'm dying to find myself a good couple of acres somewhere with plenty of privacy. 

Getting back to where I originally started, today I made some progress towards reclaiming a fraction of that freedom though, and I think that is what has gotten me feeling so positively nostalgic this morning. The early Summer days of Tennessee feel so much like the mid-Summer days of Illinois. There's just the right amount of coolness in the air intermingled with a certain, above average amount of humidity. My fiancee is out working. My paychecks are still rolling in since I work in a school these days and Summer is that one time of year where you have no responsibilities or work to do, but the check keeps coming in the mail. And I realize that I'm right back where I was as a child, to a degree. No agenda. Raw opportunity each day to do whatever I please within my new found set of limitations. There's absolutely no hurry to get anything done, or to do anything for the sake of feeling productive. Once again I'm free to do what I please. It's one of the few things that really stirs my soul up into thinking this is the way things had really ought to be, and I'm living it as a present reality. Insofar as I keep within my own unit, outside of the watchful eye of neighbors and passerbys, I am free to do whatever I want without the nagging question "why?" As if we really need a good reason for everything we do, anyways. 

I feel like so often those bits of nostalgia in our lives are like fistfuls of sand. Always fleeting, never to come back. Yet here we are with a rare victory of something reclaimed. Odd that there could be such a sense of liberation surrounded by such captivity.