On the Promise of Movement
Freedom and its consequences.
Every couple of years, I had to submit a background check form to the U.S. federal government so I could begin a series of new jobs in trail construction and wildland firefighting. The information requested was pretty simple: Your address history for the past seven years and some people to reference.
But for me, it was an overwhelming experience. I had moved to over a dozen places in just seven years. The first time I had to work with the background check application, I had to scramble. I was pulling scanned documents from the crevices of my hard drive, asking parents and friends about the address of a place I might have lived in.
The silly thing for me was that no matter where I lived (domestically), I would always re-route my mail to that address. It would have saved so much time and frustration if I just kept the mail flowing to a parent’s house.
I had lived in some places for only four months, and others up to eight, depending on the job or the length of education or my mood. Several were rooms in a shared house, one was a two-story condo, another was a single-room cabin in Alaska.
What also didn’t help was that I was also changing my phone number almost every year. I really liked having a local phone number—though one time I really liked having a phone number from Florida when I was living in Texas. I would be constantly updating my phone number with parents and friends. Even my social media was created, deleted, created, deleted, created, deleted. And my email address changed to the point that I lost access to some more important sites to help protect my identity and credit.
There was a motor in me, telling me to make it, keep it, quit it, make it, keep it, quit it, stay now, leave now. I couldn’t tell what this motor wanted for me, but the forward momentum that I my constant movement provided gave this activity that felt fulfilling and empty at the same time. Fulfilling due to all the experiences and people I was able to meet in very different places; empty because of all the experiences and people that I walked away from. There was still meat on those bones, but there I was, flying and driving to something new.
Now, I want to consider the dynamics of movement. Why do we move from one place to the next? During the frontier era of North America, a family or community would move further West because of a Promise. The Promise was freedom and opportunity.
The Promise was never ease. To break down one’s home and brave the risks of the wilderness to set up in a land without the support and infrastructure of Western society; that’s not finding the easy way out.
Nowadays, we can move by plane, bus, train, or car easily—we just need money—and we’d be arriving at another town, another city that has similar kinds of support and infrastructure as where we were in the first place. Nowadays, we’re not giving up everything to move, but we are still arriving with the slight risk of temporary social dislocation. That is to say, we’re moving away from established family and friends to a place that may be harder to make deep connections.
But I observe that the promise of freedom and opportunity still makes movement worth the cost, for those that ultimately decide to do so. But what I find so different is that for likely 80% of those that move far distances, it is the arrival at their destination that invokes new freedom and opportunity.
This particular group considers movement as a lesser evil to the stagnation that would occur by staying. To have arrived at somewhere new is to finally engage in a profound freedom and opportunity that they weren’t feeling in their current residence. Maybe they’ll have a better job, a healthier environment, a closer group to socialize with.
This is a key distinction, arrival. Because for those other 20% of movers, it is the movement itself that provides the freedom and opportunity. And for this smaller group, it’ll only be movement that will make them feel free and fortunate. Once arriving at a location, the itch of movement will come again, sooner or later, and they will feel starved of freedom. Then the next move happens again. And then the next move. And the next.
From a purely kinesthetic point of view, what is movement? In dramatic terms, it’s the forcing of the Earth to move about under one’s feet, one’s car, one’s plane. There is a great control of cosmic forces in relativity to the individual. Of course, if you step right outside that moving person, you’ll see how this is not so at all, but from the inner perspective, there is great change that occurs through the movement of your body through space.
How do people define freedom? It’s such a hard word to define because it seems like a tautology: “Freedom is freedom! Freedom is the ability to be free, right? Freedom is a state of freedom!”
On the most practical sense, however, freedom is the ability to act without obstacle.
But notice that most don’t think their freedom is being undermined by a boulder they can’t get around. Natural limitations appear to be exempt from one’s definition of freedom, because it didn’t choose to limit you, it just is limiting you. It just is.
From that word-logic, it’s that which just isn’t that becomes the barrier to unadulterated freedom. It’s that which chose to extend limits on your life that impinges on your freedom. So it must be human choice that is the central theme of freedom. There are many human choices that help to undermine one’s freedoms: Laws, culture, technology, and action, to name a few. Everyone’s most mundane actions has a consequence of undermining someone else’s freedom to do something.
If I chose to buy a fridge, my purchase action raises the demand for fridges, which then causes someone else to need to maintain or raise the purchase price for that fridge so they don’t go out of business selling money-losing fridges, with then leads to someone else being priced out of that fridge.
The United States is dealing with the keyword of “unaffordability”—to the American consumer, essential like milk and eggs and bread should be affordable—by making things too expensive, they are undermining U.S. consumers’ freedom to purchase with ease. This is a nice American way of stopping short of “people have the right to food.” People just have the right to purchase food affordably. Don’t infringe on this freedom!
So one’s amount of freedom is defined by the Other’s imposed limitations, whether spiritual, moral, financial; any control on action that can be imposed by others onto the individual.
It’s not a wonder why the Globalist is afraid of rising border controls! Their amount of freedom is dependent on national politics, which is increasingly defensive against migrants of any kind (though tourist-money is still relatively welcome in most parts of the world).
What is movement but the physical expression and maintenance of a personal freedom? So long as I can walk, ride, fly, or drive—affordably, mind you—I still have some semblance of freedom. All the Movers of the West, whether the 80%ers or the 20%ers, are feeling the squeeze on their freedom, because they are feeling the actions and choices of others impacting their path.
Give someone complete and utter freedom, what do they get? They get to live in a vacuum of choice. Where people around them must accept this Freeperson’s way of living or get out of the way. It would be unlimited power; the world would truly revolve around the Freeperson, because if any unnatural obstacle would ever glance at this Freeperson, they would be no longer a Freeperson.
So I consider movement for that 20% is a reminder of what it could be like to have complete control over their personal situation, at least in regard to physical space. When you’re making the long Texan drive from Austin to El Paso, you’re feeling the world spin beneath you at 70 miles per hour. In your own world, you’ve re-entered that taste of Freedom that’s so hard to find in a city. It’s not a wonder that Westerns are so obsessed with open spaces and movement on horses. It’s the fantasy of the unfettered individual, with no responsibilities and no ties to other peoples’ motivations, nor of any corporation, as that horse wasn’t made by a S&P 500 conglomerate.
The curse for the 20% Mover is that arrival is the start of decline, not of growth that the 80% Mover finds. Thus this smaller group is never too interested in arriving anywhere, but of going. They find themselves for six months at a fire station to work as a crewmember, and their conversations are almost always guided to where they’re going. Because it’s just not right to be here, but it’s right to be there.
Maybe Freedom is over there is well. But I’d hate to really arrive at this true state of Freedom. It seems so lonely.