Your soul’s desire for freedom

In England, legal “right to roam” means that you can walk along paths on privately held land in the countryside. I did it once to get to the chalk hills. (Image by Neil Morrell)

I received a jury summons, and it’s looking an awful lot like I’m going to be spending a lot of time at the courthouse in the near future.

This is much better than receiving a court summons, but still.

I went in last week for the first step in the jury selection process, rescheduling all of my meetings so that I could sit with a hundred others in an overheated, high-ceilinged room and stare out the window at the fading sunlight on the bare trees and the hills beyond as a patient judge gave us an eighth-grade civics lesson. Tomorrow, I have to go in again.

I understand that this is my duty as a citizen. I’m not going to pull a Liz Lemon or a Carrie Bradshaw. I definitely won’t be heading into Larry David territory. But the truth is, I do not want to give up the next two weeks of my life. I had plans, dangit!

But this is how it goes. We humans are not in charge of much in the first place, and then the government gets involved. Depending on our age, gender, and the country we happen to be born in, we might be asked to serve on a jury, conscripted into service in an unjustifiable war, or forced to languish for months on end in a series of Covid lockdowns.

This past spring, in Shanghai, the Chinese government’s stern response to the protests of its people was to instruct them to “control their soul’s desire for freedom.” How, exactly, does one do that? It’s telling that even in such a restrictive society, human beings know that their birthright is to be free. We never need to be told.

And yet, even when we have liberty, we don’t always have total freedom. Even if I didn’t have to show up at the courthouse tomorrow, there’s a long list of things I’m supposed to do and rules that I have to comply with. I don’t feel oppressed by them because I’m used to them — in some cases, I chose them. But not all of my time is my own.

That said, I feel a real sense of oppression as a result of being asked to cancel everything I had planned and show up at a particular time. It is a good reminder that I do generally have a great deal of personal freedom and rarely have others telling me what to do. I don’t like it, but I’ll accept it and work with it. It’s temporary.

It’s funny, though. I got through school by retreating to the world inside my mind anytime I didn’t want to be in class. They could tell me where to sit, but they couldn’t tell me what to think. But tomorrow, I have to be fully present, in mind and body. I have to focus on what I’m supposed to be focused on instead of sneaking away into my own head. That’s going to be hard. I’m spoiled — I haven’t had to do it in a long time.

Mind and body — what of my soul? Well, I know. I know what Victor Frankl wrote. My soul is unconditionally free at all times. I will stop whining.

Ultimately, I feel gratitude. I’m grateful that I’m potentially on the jury and not the plaintiff or the defendant. I’m grateful that I have work that I love and will be longing to get back to. I’m grateful that jury service will not likely present a significant financial hardship for me.

And I’m grateful that, when the day is done, I get to return to my life and my thoughts and my own choices. The freedom will be all the sweeter for having been briefly curtailed. It’s a good reminder of how much I truly have.