Different Kinds of Freedom

"In the day-to-day trenches of adult life, there is no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshiping  Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship.. And an outstanding reason for choosing some sort of god or spiritual-type thing to worship- be it JC or Allah, be it Yahweh or the Wiccan mother-goddess or the Four Noble Truths or some infrangible set of ethical principles- is that pretty much anything  else you worship will eat you alive. If you worship money and things- if they are where you tap real meaning in life- then you will never have enough. Never feel you have enough. It's the truth. Worship your own body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly, and when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally plant you....

The insidious thing about these forms or worship is not that they're evil or sinful; it is that they are unconscious. They are default settings. They're the kind of worship you just gradually slip into, day after day, getting more and more selective about what you see and how you measure value without ever being fully aware that that's what you're doing. And the world will not discourage you from operating on your default settings, because the world of men and money and power hums along quite nicely on the fuel of fear and contempt and frustration and craving and the worship of self...

But here are all different kinds of freedom, and the kind that is most precious you will not hear much talked about in the great outside world of winning and achieving and displaying. The really important kind of freedom involves attention, and awareness, and discipline, and effort, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them, over and over, in myriad petty little unsexy ways, every day. That is real freedom."

- David Foster Wallace, Kenyon University, 2005

I found this while surface scanning through a blog and fell in love with it. As a child it's impossible to understand what it means to be a parent. I look back at the two I have and as I've gotten older and realized they aren't perfect, I respect them more and more and I get a taste for adult life. 

One day Elliott, you and I will have kids, and we'll get really busy and stressed at times; we'll go on adventures together and have happy moments. We'll be real adults. Through all this, let's remain free!