This runs against nearly everything our contemporary culture tells us. We tend to think of freedom as the removal of restraints. More choices are better than fewer choices. More money is better than less. If something stands between us and what we want, remove the obstacle.
But Pascal--a French mathematician, physicist, inventor, and religious philosopher of major significance--understood something about human nature that we sometimes forget. Limits are not always our enemies.
Years ago I wrote something similar in one of my journals: “When we get what we want, we usually get more than we bargained for.” We may want the promotion, but discover that it comes with headaches and responsibilities that we hadn't anticipated. When we go for a bigger house, we discover that we've also acquired higher taxes, more maintenance and more rooms to clean. The pursuit of unlimited choices may leave us paralyzed because we're unable to choose or decide what we want.
The old saying, “Be careful what you wish for” is a word for the wise. The expression has survived because experience keeps proving it true.
The Paradox of Limits
Nearly everything worthwhile depends upon some kind of limitation. Consider music. A piano has only 88 keys. Western music is constructed around a limited number of notes. Musical composition has rules governing harmony, rhythm and structure. Yet Bach, Beethoven, Duke Ellington and Bob Dylan somehow managed to create astonishingly different things within these limitations. The limits didn't prevent creativity. They made creativity possible.
The same is true of a football field. There are sidelines. There is a clock. There are rules about what you can and cannot do with the ball. Remove all the restrictions and you haven't created greater freedom for the players. You've destroyed the game. (Suppose, for example, that defenders could rush before the ball is snapped.)
Language works the same way. Grammar limits how we arrange words, but those limitations enable us to communicate. A sonnet has fourteen lines and a particular structure. That restriction has not prevented poets from writing beautiful sonnets. It gives them something to work against.
Could it be that life works that way, too?
Freedom From What?
We often speak about freedom without completing the sentence. Freedom from what? And perhaps more importantly: freedom for what?
There is obviously much to be said for freedom from oppression, coercion and arbitrary authority. But there is another kind of freedom that sounds attractive until we examine where it leads: freedom from obligation, responsibility and consequences.
Marriage is an obvious example. When we marry someone, we voluntarily surrender possibilities. We make a promise that closes certain doors. That sounds restrictive because it is restrictive. But the restriction is precisely what gives the promise its meaning.
If I promise to meet you Tuesday but reserve the right to change my mind whenever something more interesting comes along, I haven't really made a promise. Commitment limits us. It also makes trust possible.
The Gift of Resistance
Some of the things we initially regard as obstacles may actually be doing us a favor. Deadlines force us to finish. After forty-five years of freelance writing I have never missed a deadline. When I was in fourth or fifth grade we were paired with other classmates to do a collaborative report for geography. The day before the report was due, my co-author notified me that he had done nothing. No research, no notes. I complained to my mom ho unfair it was, but she was smarter than me. She said I had to stay up and write the report, no matter how late it was when I finished. While working on it, I witnessed something miraculous that I've never forgotten, that I never would have seen had I not been required to finish that night.
Budgets a likewise a challenge because they force us to prioritize. When money is tight, we discover what really matters to us.
Physical limitations force athletes to train. The difficulty of mastering an instrument makes playing it well satisfying. The resistance of the blank page forces a writer to think. What am I really trying to say?
Even boredom may have its uses. Generations before ours didn't carry a device in their pocket capable of filling every empty moment with entertainment. They occasionally had to sit quietly. Or ponder. Or notice what was happening around them. Whether eliminating boredom through reels news clips has made us happier is another question.
Modern technology has steadily removed friction from everyday life. We can buy nearly anything without leaving home. We can watch thousands of movies without waiting for one to appear on television. We can communicate instantly with someone on the other side of the planet. And thought these are remarkable achievements, every solved problem seems to bring another problem with it.
More Than We Bargained For
He isn't necessarily saying that wanting things is wrong. Nor is he suggesting poverty, hardship or oppression are somehow desirable. The deeper point concerns human nature. We aren't always particularly good at knowing what will make us happy.
A child may want all the candy he can eat, but an adult understands why that isn't a good idea. On the other hand, adulthood does not necessarily eliminate the impulse. We simply acquire more sophisticated forms of candy.
We pursue these things believing satisfaction waits somewhere on the other side. Sometimes it does. Sometimes we arrive and discover another appetite waiting for us. In The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (The Chronicles of Narnia), the White Witch seductively lures Edmund away from loyalty to Aslan and his family with what C.S. Lewis called Turkish Delight. In the story Turkish Delight becomes a metaphor for all the various temptations that lure us away from our true calling and higher self: money, recognition, possessions, pleasure, status, power, freedom from obligations.
There is always a little more money to make, another achievement to pursue, another possession to acquire, another experience we haven't had. The finish line keeps moving, and the reward of tasting more Turkish Delight propels us forward.
Perhaps that is why wisdom traditions have generally placed such emphasis on restraint. Temperance, patience, faithfulness, discipline and self-control sound old-fashioned because each involves voluntarily accepting limits.
The real bottom line is this: a person incapable of saying no to himself isn't really free. He is simply governed by his appetites.
Getting what we want isn't necessarily a bad thing. On the other hand, some doors are better left closed.
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