The State of Freedom
A journey of Truth into the mind’s sanctuary
with the destination of inner Freedom.
Α17. Death and rebirth.
Next evening…
Like it has often happened, today life provided me with an additional stimulation for the planned retrospect. This morning at eight o’clock my bedfast sister-grandmother took her last breath. She was for me the last example of a generation which came through two world wars, a symbol of the past which was huddled by the anxious thoughts and now dies to leave free space to a roomier present to develop.
She died at the birthday of her daughter, that is to say my mother, in order to remind me in one more way that the death of the past signals the birth of the present and the future.
My pampered grandmother, the eternal maiden, an authentic offspring of the Athenian aristocracy of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century, symbolized for me my high-ceilinged parental home, which always pullulated with people and a feeling of security. She also reminded me of my childhood, which was free of any responsibilities and troubles like the ones which adults usually have, but at the same time so much troubled by my childish anxieties which left their mark on my future, as I adopted and embodied them and still carry them within every cell of mine.
Death liberated her – hopefully – from the accumulated fears of one century, which sprang up deliriously from her lips during the last few months of her life without any censorship performed by the reason, which had vanished due to many consecutive brain strokes[1]. At the same time, she also partially liberated me from the burden of the prison which I had constructed as a child and as a youngster, believing without discrimination the fears of my ancestors as real and making them also my fears.
The first substantial taste of freedom came a few years after my father passed away, when I realized that now I live for me and not for him and when I noted that I do not see the world through his deforming filter of the expectations and anxieties of his mind anymore, but directly with my mind. Before that I was not even aware of the existence of this deforming filter, because I had never seen how lighter and clearer the world looks without it.
[1] She was anxiously longing for her mother, dreaded various nonexistent dangers etc.