The moment you felt free
“Do you remember the moment you felt free?”
We noticed this sign just as the three of us sat down for our last dinner together after 5 days writing across Madrid, Granada and Malaga. As you can imagine, a lively discussion followed.
For the previous 6 days I had been visually bombed with creativity and saturated colours wherever I looked. We walked through the narrow cobbled pavements of the oldest neighbourhoods in each city. We visited parks and green spaces, so we were never far from lush vegetation and blooming spring flowers currently thriving in the warm and unusually rainy spring. The unfamiliar visual prompts stirred my thinking and set my soul reverberating. New ideas hummed and my mind opened in a way that now I realise had been shuttered for awhile.
I’m sure the Spanish cityscape and relaxed culture had a lot to do with the ability to find new ways to see familiar words and ideas. It was travel, but with laser-focus.
The three of us, although having never travelled or worked together, developed a lovely rhythm each day. We spent plenty of hours writing, either alone or in a quiet room together. We went for long walks around the two cities we visited—in addition to Madrid where my companions live—and ate delicious meals out. Every morning at breakfast we set our intentions for that day. In the evening as we walked to our wine bar destination, we reviewed how the day had gone for each of us. Once we arrived at our chosen wine bar and settled in, we discussed each one of our writing samples in turn.
Like anyone in any practice where you seek to improve and learn new skills, focusing for an extended time on these skills with colleagues to discuss the process and progress is a HUGE gift. Plus, for a few days anyway, there were no daily life distractions and chores: no dishes, cooking, laundry; no one else to care for or juggle schedules around.
It was bliss.
The time spent reviewing and in conversation with my fellow writers about craft itself by focusing, for example, on the details of specific words chosen and structural pros and cons was a literary delight. I was elevated to a buzzy-happy place during and after these discussions. Of course, this was entirely due to the skills and observations of my co-writers who have far more experience than I do, and I thank them heartily for all I learned during our extended conversations. It is amazing to come at something creative after a long life doing other things, and to find a comfortable home in this new world of writers. I feel very blessed.
And then there was that question of feeling free! When did I feel free? Have I ever felt free? What exactly does free mean?
There are many moments that I have felt exhilaration, joy, delight, slightly-jittery out-of-body fabulousness, but free? That was much harder to pinpoint. And the way it is phrased: “the moment you felt free”: does it mean just one moment, once? Or is it the moment from which you have (and still should?) feel free? Clearly, it was not an easy answer as I dithered my way around to find an answer.
The closest I can think of as moments when I have felt something akin to free are those several precipice moments, when you are at the edge of starting something completely new, and you are leaning forward into the moment of letting go of all that is familiar and known. The next step is that one into the air, off the ledge or through the doorway: all of which lead to parts unknown, but brimming with possibility.
Some examples of stepping-off-the-edge moments (that all involve airplanes !?!): getting on the airplane that took me 3,000 miles away from home to start my university education; flying to England for the first time when I was taking a break from my University education to work and travel; and leaving California to join my partner in England for this current chapter of my life.
And there are non-airplane times too. One in particular I remember vividly. It was early in the school year at my new high school; I was swinging in the warm September afternoon air on a grown-up sized pair of swings with my new friend Martha. We were swinging very high, back and forth, through the air, up towards the dark green leafy sycamore trees then back down to the clipped grass backwards—whoosh!—and back up again. Over and over. We were talking about how this was the best day of our long 13-year-old lives and how we understood that we were here, right here on this planet, now, and we are alive. It was a level of self-awareness that was completely new. And with it came this sense of ownership of our lives that I hadn’t felt or understood before. Our whole lives were ahead of us and the possibilities seemed boundless. I think that is a moment when I felt free.
But of course the teenage years and all the many decades since then have been filled with so much more than feeling free. There has been all the good stuff that fills up our lives—the people, the laughter, the travel, the arts—and even the crummy stuff that “builds character” as my mom and her best friend used to laugh and say when one thing after another would go awry. I have had my share of character-building too.
For now, I come closest to feeling free when the power of our minds allows us to find joy in the small things, in the everyday; to see and appreciate the wonderful parts of life we have been blessed with, no matter how awful everything else might be that day. When we can muster our minds to to seek out that beauty or joy, we can feel free anytime, at least for a few moments.
Thank you for reading this week!
Let me know how you feel free, and what ways you seek it out (if you do!). Do you have a specific moment where you remember feeling free? Is feeling free important to you?
Hope your spring is spring-like, or your autumn, autumnal!
xoxo Sabrina
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Such beautiful words, Sabrina! And equally beautiful memories. Although we didn't touch on it at the time, reading this and thinking back on our trip, writing (especially when combined with travel) definitely makes me feel free in an exhilerated way. I shall treasure this post and the memories it invokes! ❤️❤️❤️❤️
That is an interesting question. Certainly, my exhilaration on heading off to college qualifies. After flying across the country, I spent a night in a hotel room in a unfamiliar city before arriving at the university the next day. My sense of freedom was mixed with uncertainty—they often go together. Another candidate for me is the feeling that I felt at age 22, after being paid for being a professional geologist for the first time and having two days of leave at my disposal. I wandered the streets of Ketchikan with light feet, and bought a book of poetry in a bookshop that I still treasure.