By: Karl Kristian Flores
How do you achieve freedom in today’s world? The short answer: don’t go to work today.
No, I’m just kidding. Well, it helps. I’m not sure— in fact, I don’t really know anything, but I’d love to share with you some ideas that can hopefully flip a switch in you.
My favorite people
Every writer has their own fascination with some rare facet of life that drives their work. Along the list, mine are goodbyes, charm, and exploring a reason to be good. Throughout, I have always been interested in a certain type of people: free spirits.
When I meet someone at the market who scans the grocery aisle a certain way or when I speak with a stranger whose eyes tell you they’ve seen half the world, I get so intrigued. Naturally, I scoot closer to those individuals. I seek them, I find them, I admire them. I always wonder: how did they get there?
An excerpt from The Goodbye Song
Charlie faced the other way. “I don’t want to go to school today, Mom.”
“Why not?”
“I just want to see. I don’t know. Do the day different.”
Charlie is a kid who has a burning desire to discover something new. He is loosely based on my adolescent adventures in the Bay Area. To tell you the truth, I graduated college this year, but I only ever went to school about 65% of the time.
Many days, I’d skip. Sometimes, I was suspended from campus entirely. And others, I would feign sickness.
This led to some consequences— a fun fact being that I didn’t know that stars were suns. Based on the images I saw as a child, I actually thought stars were floating balls of light in between planets. I was sixteen years old when I found out the truth and could not stop laughing at the fact that I must have been absent when my teacher told us. But skipping had its upsides: I was encouraged to find comfort in the unknown.
Being alone
Boredom is not only a privilege, but a right, because everyone deserves a pending adventure. We must search for times in our week to be unruled. If and when I did attend school, my mother was never able to pick me up until nighttime. I was stuck on wooden benches for hours for over a decade.
If we were released at 3 p.m., my mother would pick me up no earlier than 9 o’clock in the evening. This was every school day and the world was my suburban oyster. I was so okay with being alone that I eventually preferred it. My activities included walking up hills, reading flyers, watching birds, playing chess, and thinking about everything that happened that day.
Individuality
On those parking lot nights of extensive waiting, I agreed on reality: I am stuck with my head for the rest of my life, so I might as well get along with it. And there was only one pure way of securing the companionship between self and mind: self-conversation. Or what I would dare call: self-preservation.
Our minds are, sadly, dictated by people who paid to be there—governments, restaurants, and corporations. In one of the short stories in the book, a character named Phillip sits on a bench.
His dilemma?
“To rest after work, he streamed a movie. In the morning, he watched the news. On his way to work, songs boomed in his headphones to energize himself. During his breaks, he read the paper so he could talk about the paper. Why was it always someone else’s thoughts in his head?” (pg. 185).
Society: beware of missing persons
It is common to attach ourselves to titles and organizations. We like to say we hold the position of this, belong to this group, grew up here, and have won this.
But we ought to be suspicious about titles that do the speaking for us. They aren’t our identity, not even close! They only tell us that someone has allowed us to be there and for safety, we clench to these names and labels. We are not institutions, but merely its unique attendants.
Beneath the big words that go before and after our name, we are something else—that soft other animal that loves things and wonders. Personally, I’ve found that the quickest way to get to know someone is not to ask what things they’ve done, but rather: “What do you think about?”
Owning your headspace
To find ourselves and grow, we have to exercise freedom of thought. We learn that Phillip’s identity could not be formed, even when it was his day off. You’d think that because he was alone, he’d be free. But solitude is not the condition for freedom; rather, it is clearance. We achieve ownership of our rightful mental property by ensuring we are the only ones who live in it.
Education is necessary, but it must be redefined. I think we undoubtedly grow when we are introduced to new ideas, but the only way for ideas to be truly digested is if there’s a person to digest them in the first place. Otherwise, we memorize quotations without letting them first affect us.
Who are we really?
We all want to know how to be a better person. Please accept the offering that our only mission is to be alive before life can improve us. A lot of these moments of meaning for these characters in The Goodbye Song were when they abandoned the predictability of the day and instead sought to explore the quietness of the human mind.
This is not an advocation for society to quit their jobs. That’s too romantic, and I’m not into theories. But in a life of distractions and noise, what I urge for my readers to consider is when someone else’s thoughts are in our head. If we quiet those voices and listen attentively to our soul, we might hear something like this poem:
“I like how my hands look.
I was a little too mean to dad.
I miss playing in high school band.
The girl I walked past looked a little sad.
I don’t really like my job.
I’m no longer in love with Rudy.
Oh, I forgot to pray to God.
I pray tomorrow will be a beauty…” (pg. 8)
Listen. And listen more. If we meditate to ourselves in peace, we will recognize that thoughts are like fragile birds and we have so much to sing about. After a while, we become sensitive to our own truth. We invite ourselves to the strangeness that is humanity.
How do you achieve freedom in the digital age?
Of course, there are some practical ways I can offer: setting a day where you are blind to time, a night sleeping without your phone, and using a “sick day” to people watch. But there is a more lasting philosophy to consider: be as bored as you possibly can and do not be satisfied when you find what cures it.
Boredom is the key to an interesting life because all human beings have to start from somewhere. Worthy hearts need to develop as opposed to being enveloped. Ironically, the most interesting people we meet are likely the ones who have been bored the longest.
Wrapping it up
Charlie didn’t go to school that day and ended up learning more about the world from conversations with strangers. Phillip, for the first time in his life, heard himself. In my case, I waited so long in parking lots that every night, I drove away in a little automobile called imagination. I write books today to share with you where I go.
No serious poetry was written during my childhood, but those pavement thoughts that built on each other, the strangers I met, the weather, the gardens, and the waiting, all play a role in a poet’s rhythm and words. And I think one’s pavement thoughts will be the only reason they say “I love you” to one distinct person and not the rest of us.
Those eyes you see, the ones that are divinely free, were not born that way. They found something and it was bright enough to light them still. Individuality is meant not only for us, but for others. We need to be whole so we can meet the right hearts who are full too.
Our closest loved ones deserve us. And who are we now but “things” that think we are people?
About Karl Kristian Flores
Kristian Flores (born “Karl Kristian Flores,” Oct. 20 1999 — ) is a writer, and also known for his film and theatre performances as an actor and volunteer service awarded by President Obama, Rotary International, U.S. Congress, University of Southern California, City of Los Angeles, and more. Kristian was born in California, shifting around the San Francisco Bay Area under a single-parent household. Kirkus Reviews commends Kristian’s writing, calling it: “Poignant… and exquisitely crafted.” UK’s Neon Books, as well, paints an image of Kristian’s style as an excellent thinker, saying: “The subjects Flores chooses to focus his gaze on are surprising… It sits in a liminal territory that too few poetry books inhabit.” Flores’ most recent book, The Goodbye Song, is available now on Amazon.
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Boredom is the foggy path before bursting out at the edge of a river that takes one’s breath away.
Love the last line of this thought-provoking piece too.
Thanks for sharing!
Thanks for reading and sharing your thoughts!