#16 ‘PowerLess’
ELEMENTARY
16.
‘PowerLess’ -Freedom-
When I emigrated to The Netherlands, I left my hometown in the middle of the night. It was not one of those nights when the streets were pitch dark and only the light of the moon was showing the silhouettes of the ghostly town. Not one of those nights you walked almost running, hoping you will soon find yourself in the safety of your home, passing the places known for hosting packs of street dogs or potential maniacs. At home, the candlelight would give a sense of comfort and warmth in the fascinating silence. Silence in which you don’t only experience the lack of sound, but also lack of vibrations. No waves of electricity. It is a silence in which your bones rest and which makes you whisper out of humble respect. No humming of cars or buses due to the shortage of fuel. Silent streets. The only means of transportation and moving around depends on your power. Your will. If you take aside the reasons for it, it was a pretty interesting time of realising who you truly are stripped off of all the help and luxury of the modern world. Each time the waves of electrical power kicked in, it was like something around you would crack open and your soul would be hatched into this world again.
Back home in the country that doesn't exist anymore, we lived in the beginning of the ’90s under a political embargo. They said that we were in a war. It crept into our lives, building up for years little by little, unnoticeable. The choices which we made out of habit, culture, passion, fun, spite, negligence and stubbornness, led us to a new reality nobody could have dreamed of. But that’s not how we saw it. It was they who did it to us while we were just living our lives day by day.
As the inflation was galloping and the zeros were adding up, and a loaf of bread would reach a price of millions or billions of Dinars, the value of money had to be adjusted every week. Taking off zeros, printing new banknotes, learning to read the value and recognising the pictures and the colour of the paper was a sport for the mind. The day the salary would arrive, it was crucial to run to a bank, which hopefully still had money to cash out the paycheck that same day. As we were waiting in the lines streets long, we felt the time ticking and the value of the piece of paper in our hands dropping per hour. With it, the value of our work and lives. If lucky enough to get money from the bank, we would run to the black market, where next to the vegetable stands, there were standing the dealers of real money. The Deutsche Mark. The value that in comparison to ours was growing every day, becoming a dream. The value of the world out there.
Once a couple of hundred, hopefully, not forged DM were in our pockets, we could start going on with the business of the day. Adjusting, adapting, creating, living, studying, working and some of us hiding.
Looking back, despite hiding a young man at my address so he would not be drafted to the army and sent to fight them, I did not think about freedom. I had no time for that. In the moments of real hardship, there is only the next step. To make that step is to be free. Free of the limitations of your own mind and finding satisfaction in every little victory on the way.
Later when I settled into my new life full of opportunities and values, freedom became a broad and never-ending dream, and as I have experienced it, is a living and breathing mechanism. It wants to grow and ultimately becomes opportunistic in protecting itself. In those rare moments when we do feel free, we should breathe in fully and ask ourselves what we are doing with it, what is its purpose and value. Before it turns into hedonism and wants to feed on the freedom of something or someone around us, making us aggressive. Freedom as an ultimate value, one of the hardest disciplines in life which requires so much emotional and spiritual growth. Let's hope we get there someday...
Freedom to live in peace, to speak freely, to learn, to love, to worship, to believe, to work, to express, to vote, to think, to create, to die, to be who you are, to let others be free…
The night I left my hometown, I don’t remember.
