23

NO FREEDOM WITHOUT BONDAGE: Freedom is merely a temporary release from bondage, by no means a permanent one. It is the negative antithesis to the positive bondage, a reprieve from that which should normally be the predominating influence in a person's life. Without bondage there can be no freedom, without freedom no bondage. Whether your particular bondage be in writing, painting, reading, lecturing, clerking, washing, printing, sweeping, typing, building, driving, or anything else, the essential thing is that you should be living as a freeman for the sake of your bondage rather than as a bondsman for the sake of your freedom. For to live as a bondsman for the sake of your freedom is to live negatively, to aspire from what may be termed the negative-positive to the positive-negative, rather than from the negative to the positive as one should normally do. After all, it isn't so much the kind of work one does ... as to how one feels about doing it that really matters. One can live just as positively by being a clerk, a typist, a shop assistant, a car mechanic, etc., as by being an artist, a manager, a teacher, or an army officer. It depends entirely on the type of person one is.

But if one is doing one thing and genuinely desires to do something else - ah! that is when one is living against the grain, living as a freeman-in-bondage rather than as a bondsman-in-freedom, and should therefore do something to alter it. For in a predominantly positive life, a life that identifies with its work and can properly express itself through that work, the freedom acquired once one's work is finished for the day is always legitimately negative. The individual concerned can afford, if needs be, to spend time chatting casually to various friends and/or acquaintances, or watching a rather frivolous film, or leisurely reading an inconsequential book, or going for a lengthy stroll, or just idling somewhere by himself without feeling even the slightest need to get down to some serious work, the kind of work he might otherwise feel that he really ought to be doing in order not to waste any valuable time. But the man who cannot 'waste' any time, after his official work is over for the day, isn't living as well as he could be. In a sense, he isn't really living at all!