Quest for Freedom
I look back at the early corridors of my life
and see how many maps I carried
before I knew they were maps.
Some promised that freedom waited behind power,
possession, victory, being right.
Humanity has walked those passages for centuries,
leaving monuments at the entrance
and graves where the corridor narrowed.
Other people left different marks.
A sentence preserved.
A question asked when asking was dangerous.
A hand refusing cruelty.
A life spent opening a door
that would not open for them in time.
Those marks became part of my own map:
warnings scratched into one wall,
small lights left burning along another.
And somewhere in the searching I found God—
not as a prize waiting at the centre of the maze,
but as the direction that kept leading me back to love.
Love did not remove the labyrinth.
It changed the way I travelled it.
A dead end did not have to become a home.
A wrong turn did not have to become a name.
A wall could be admitted as a wall
without pretending I had reached the end of what was possible.
One corridor in my mid-twenties was cannabis.
I cannot honestly say it gave me nothing: sometimes it softened the day.
But the relief became a circle - smoke, short escape, cloudiness -
then a life that felt smaller when I returned to it.
I was living alone and smoking alone. Jobs did not hold.
Money did not stay in my account. Relationships slipped away.
Even soccer - the game I loved - moved further from me,
and my thinking rarely felt fully clear.
After another hospital admission, something became harder to avoid:
this was not worth where it kept taking me.
I tried it occasionally in later years, but the old warning signs returned.
A full-time job at the Baxter Tavern became one piece of steadier ground.
I had not escaped the labyrinth; I had learned one corridor well enough
to stop calling it freedom.
The conclusion did not become a clean conversion. I tried cannabis again from time to time, and there were still moments when I wanted what it seemed to offer. Seeing a corridor clearly does not mean we never enter it again. The change was that I had begun to recognise the signs sooner — the cloudiness, the narrowing, the old circle returning — and I no longer had to call the pattern freedom simply because part of me still wanted the relief.
I have learned to distrust the doors marked power, possession, glory, revenge - not because they never open, but because too often they open by closing behind somebody else.
Freedom cannot require another person to become less free.
So the quest has changed.
Freedom, then, has not meant becoming pure enough to stop wanting the wrong road. It has meant becoming more able to notice what a road is doing to my life while there is still time to turn.
I no longer imagine freedom as one final exit where nothing can wound me and every contradiction disappears.
I think of it as the ability to turn again: to notice when fear has chosen the corridor, when anger has begun drawing the map, before suffering becomes permission to pass suffering on.
Freedom is being able to reach a dead end
without becoming the dead end.
It is being able to say: I was wrong. I was lost.
I followed something that made the world smaller. I can still turn.
And when the way opens, freedom is not running through alone.
It is remembering the people whose marks helped me and leaving something behind for the next traveller: a warning where the floor gives way, a door held open, a light low enough to be seen by someone searching close to the ground.
Perhaps I will never stand outside the labyrinth and see its whole design.
Perhaps none of us will.
But I know more clearly what I am looking for:
not endless escape,
not victory over every limit,
but a life in which I can keep choosing
what widens love instead of what builds another wall.
The freedom to turn. The freedom to learn.
The freedom to leave a little less darkness behind me.
And when I lose the way,
the freedom to begin again.
