Free Roaming

For Christmas, I was given a copy of A Libertarian Walks Into A Bear, by Matthew Hongoltz-Hetling. It’s a funny and compelling book about an experiment in extreme libertarian governance in rural New Hampshire in the early 2000s, and the somewhat uniquely American notion of freedom – also bears, I should add – but mostly freedom. I once wrote a novel set in the antebellum south, and in my research discovered that a lot of folks were not that keen on freedom, and not, apparently, just because some of them held slaves. We live in a society, they pointed out, and a society was held together by laws and rules, and weren’t those more important in the end than everyone getting to do whatever they heck wanted?

It's a debate we’ve been having with ourselves for a very long time, and will probably continue having long after I’m dead. How it will resolve, I don’t know, but I do know this: I’m always unhappy when I don’t feel free. Or, perhaps more accurately, I don’t feel free unless I can pursue happiness as I understand it. Or maybe it really is the other way around. It’s hard to say, because freedom and happiness are one and the same.

Writing teaches us this. I can’t write the book you’re writing. I can’t, and I don’t want to. I don’t want to write it even though I have no idea what it’s about. It might go on to sell ten million copies, and I still don’t want to. I want to write the books I want to write, even if sometimes I don’t know what those are. The same, I know, is true for you. In this way, we are exactly equal. The greatest pleasure I’ve known in my life is the fulfillment of my unique creative desire. That desire expresses itself in stories, and in relationships, and conversations, and homes, and music, and everything. Everything, everything, everything everywhere is an expression of it.

In Hongoltz-Hetling’s book, bears become a big problem for the locals. The bears are as free as can be, and also very hungry and occasionally dangerous. A group effort is required to deal with them, an approach libertarians view with profound skepticism. I get it. I’m a bit of a loner myself, avoiding crowds whenever possible. But life is a collaborative endeavor whether we like it or not. Even when I write I’m aware something is helping me, that I can’t do it alone. The more, however, I let my imagination wander bear-like wherever it must to find what it needs, the easier I find it is to get along with other people, to grant them the freedom they need to live as only they know how.

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Everyone Has What It Takes: A Writer’s Guide to the End of Self-Doubt
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