We spend our lives trying to find our power and our freedom. It is not easy: We live in a culture that has distorted the meaning and measure of power, confusing visibility with value, status with substance, attention with love; we live in a universe where free will may be an illusion, where chance deals the vast majority of the cards — the family and epoch we are born into, the body and biochemistry we live in, the people we cross paths with, the accidents of chemistry and happenstance we call love. The great double-edged question is how to keep power from becoming a prison and how much freedom we can find between the narrow parameters of our givens. But somewhere deep down, in the marrow of our language, we seem to know: The word power shares its Middle Latin root with possibility — its only measure is that which liberates the possible in us; our only power is our freedom. Art from An Almanac of Birds: 100 Divinations for Uncertain Days, also available as a stand-alone print and as stationery cards.“Nothing is more unbearable, once one has it, than freedom,” James Baldwin wrote. It is unbearable largely because it demands a shedding of the self with all of its attachments — to ways of being, to ideas about how the world ought to be, to particular interpretations of reality. Such attachments are shackles best broken by what Irish Murdoch has so splendidly termed unselfing, key to each of the five kinds of freedom she identified in literature and life. For Murdoch, freedom takes radical unsefling — only then are we truly free to both be ourselves and love each other:Freedom is exercised in the confrontation by each other, in the context of an infinitely extensible work of imaginative understanding, of two irreducibly dissimilar individuals. Love is the imaginative recognition of, that is respect for, this otherness.This is why, for Octavio Paz — who thought deeply about freedom — love is “a knot made of two intertwined freedoms.” And if love is our fulcrum of belonging, then belonging itself is woven of the same paradox — something Maya Angelou articulates in one of her finest interviews:You only are free when you realize you belong no place — you belong every place — no place at all.Art by Ofra Amit for The Dark Wood of the Golden Birds by Margaret Wise BrownIn this sense, freedom is the hinge between being and belonging that swings open the door to being ourselves — which, yet again paradoxically, must include the freedom to change, to confront the illusory solidity of the self, its ceaseless mutability. Psychoanalyst Karen Horney formulates this perfectly in her pioneering work on the fundaments of personal growth:We do not need an inner strait jacket with which to shackle our spontaneity, nor the whip of inner dictates to drive us to perfection. There is no doubt that such disciplinary methods can succeed in suppressing undesirable factors, but there is also no doubt that they are injurious to our growth. We do not need them because we see a better possibility of dealing with destructive forces in ourselves: that of actually outgrowing them. The way toward this goal is an ever increasing awareness and understanding of ourselves. Self-knowledge, then, is not an aim in itself, but a means of liberating the forces of spontaneous growth… And as we lose the neurotic obsession with self, as we become free to grow ourselves, we also free ourselves to love and to feel concern for other people.Then, and only then, can we contact the soul beneath the self, which is the only real locus of our freedom. Vassily Grossman — who spent a thousand days as a correspondent on the frontlines of the Holocaust — captures this beautifully in a passage from his almost unbearably poignant reckoning with life and death:What constitutes the freedom, the soul of an individual life, is its uniqueness. The reflection of the universe in someone’s consciousness is the foundation of his or her power, but life only becomes happiness, is only endowed with freedom and meaning when someone exists as a whole world that has never been repeated in all eternity. Only then can they experience the joy of freedom and kindness, finding in others what they have already found in themselves.donating = lovingFor seventeen years, I have been spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars each month composing The Marginalian (which bore the outgrown name Brain Pickings for its first fifteen years). It has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, no assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider lending a helping hand with a donation. Your support makes all the difference.newsletterThe Marginalian has a free weekly newsletter. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week’s most inspiring reading. Here’s what to expect. Like? Sign up.