Let’s start this with a question: what is freedom?

   Some believe that it is fictional, that the human species is designed to be given orders.Whether these orders come from our brain, directing our body to breathe automatically, or your boss telling you to grab him a coffee for the sixth time that week, even though you are only three levels down from him. Your brain sends electrical signals throughout your body, which control your muscles, and all of your vital organs. Take the time to move your left hand, and place it on your right. What you just did there is called voluntary muscle control. Your brain sent the signal for your hand, or arm, to move.

   Now try to stop your heart from beating. You can’t. This is involuntary muscle control. Think of yourself as a machine, occasionally needing maintenance as all things do, and completely sentient of your place in the universe. You know that you are a human. You know that this giant ball of gasses, earth, and water is spinning around aimlessly throughout a vast, seemingly endless void in which other galaxies exist. You can control your own actions, a concept called “free will.”

   Well, suppose you suffer from a mental-illness that causes you to see, or hear things which make you lash out, or paranoid. Consider those who have Tourette’s Syndrome. Are they conscious of the noises, phrases, or movements that come so suddenly? Do they decide whether or not they blurt out an obscenity? Is this freedom?

   I believe I speak for all of us, when I simply state, “No, it is not.” Then is freedom the ability to be in control of your own actions, and thoughts? Is there really an answer to that question? What is freedom? If there is a divine-being, some deity or god, then were we created by that being to have free will? What is “free will?” Are we really in control of our faculties, and thoughts? Are we simply simulated for some unknown experiment?

   Those questions cannot necessarily be answered, without enlightenment from some other party. What I can say, however, is that we as humankind can create our own freedom. Recall what I stated earlier, about involuntary and voluntary actions. Is the ability to control your thoughts, movements, and functions considered “freedom,” if your brain can at any given moment cause you to blink without thinking, or breathe? You’d think not, right? Well, that is not necessarily true. To finally answer the long-lasting question, instead of explaining what freedom is not, let me explain what freedom is.

   Freedom is the fact that you and I are able to decide whether we are going to rob a bank today, or go to work. Just that thought between the two actions alone, is freedom. That sentience of who you are, and what you can do. Knowing that the individual has the ability to make choices. Being without worry, or worrying constantly. All of these things are freedom. You get to wake up, and decide everything you are going to do that day. Should something, some other event prevent those decisions from happening, you have the ability to think up a different plan. That, dear reader, is freedom. 

   Not being driven, or at least entirely controlled, by primitive, animalistic instincts. To think about tomorrow. To even know that there is a tomorrow. Sentience: the ability to differentiate between things, to have feelings, and to be aware of your environments, including the things within it. Now, sentience is not necessarily freedom, but one must possess sentience to have freedom. 

    Go outside and smell the air, after you read this. Look up at the sky. Watch a bird as it flies high above, without a single care. Smile, as it does this, or don’t. You have that choice. The bird does not. You may not be able to just fly away from any problem, but at least you are aware that there is a problem, and that there is a way to fix it. You can think of the future; a bird only exists in the present. This is freedom.

End.