When I first started thinking about the two, I was convinced that one begets the other, but the more I consider everything, the more I think that certainty and freedom are like a dating couple--fiercely intertwined, but not always on the same page.
My initial thought about certainty and freedom centered around a certain ginger-haired three-year-old and the fact that without any prompting, she declared to her mother (one of my dearest friends) that the baby I am expecting would be a girl and she began to call her Willow. When the gender of our little one was recently confirmed, I really started thinking about Clare and her certainty about this child--earlier than we were even comfortable telling the rest of the world that she was on the way.
Clare isn't bogged down by experiences--bad or good. She isn't swayed by preconceived notions or the many things that I read as my husband and I desperately tried to conceive. She is a free-spirited little girl who just felt something in her heart--for whatever reason--and felt it with great certainty.
It occurred to me that freedom allows you to be certain.
But then I started to think about all the ways in which life can sometimes appear more like the other side of that coin. Sometimes our greatest certainties in life actually chip away at our sense of freedom in life.
Today marks the twelfth anniversary of the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center, the Pentagon and a plane full of passengers who met a tragic, yet heroic fate in a field in Pennsylvania. I read a Facebook post by CNN about a family this morning, who lost a husband and father in one of the towers. For years they had taken cold comfort in the idea that their loved one probably died instantly due to his location in the building. After a decade, a final note, handwritten by their loved one, came to light. He was trying to let people on the ground know that he and others were alive and in need of help. While they now know that he had hope and was trying to save his own life and the lives of others, they also know that he certainly knew that he likely wouldn't make it out. I don't think any of us can imagine the kind of anguish he suffered. Being certain that he didn't suffer is a comfort his family can no longer hold onto, but if there is a bright side, they know he held onto hope.
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| We can choose to find the light, even when consumed by the dark. |
I'm spending more time at home now, and I find myself watching a little bit of television. Periodically throughout the day, I'll see commercials for those amazing cancer treatment centers that give people hope when they have been given the diagnosis of certain death. I imagine being told you're dying can have a couple of possible impacts: 1) It can prompt you to fight like hell, and live the rest of the time in the way you should already have been living anyway. 2) It can bring you to a dead halt because in that instant, the freedom of having a future has been taken away.
I had an amazing uncle who was diagnosed with Non-Hodgkin Lymphoma. He was a good man--probably one of the best I ever got to know. He wasn't given much hope, but he had a lot that he wanted to live for--a wife, a son and his family. He fought for more than ten years. He lived well beyond any certain pronouncement about how long he should hope to be around. During that time, he got to become a grandfather. He continued to be a rallying point of his family. He continued to be someone that I will always love and remember.
He chose not to let certainty steal his life or his future. He chose to freely live his life to the very last moment possible. He took back things that cancer was supposed to steal.
Not every one of us will be given a terminal diagnosis, but at some point, each one of us will face a moment that puts us at a cross-roads in life. That moment will paralyze us with fear or it will force us to choose the life we have already been pining for. We will have to make a choice.
There are moments of certainty that can force us to retake our freedom. The loss of a job. A relocation. Acknowledgment of our failures.
In the moment that my husband and I were so fortunate to get to see our little one playing on an ultrasound screen just a couple of weeks ago, the sonographer told us she was pretty sure that we had a little girl on our hands. She advised against running out to buy any pink clothing just yet, because she could be wrong. When I got the call from our genetic counselor to get the news that our little one appears to be healthy and normal, she also confirmed that the sonographer had been right.
Buying a pink outfit is nothing like choosing to live every last breath, or to accept the certainty of death, but it is an expression of a freedom that I never thought I would feel a year ago. The dream of any child seemed impossible.
The hope for that freedom sparkled through the words of certainty that a little three-year-old girl spoke to her mother just a short while ago. Through her open and free heart, she knew, somehow, who our little girl will be.
I still think freedom can allow us to be certain about things we have no way of truly knowing. But I also have come to believe that certainty allows us to make choices--to become free. We don't always walk through the right door. I think Neil Peart said it best when he wrote the lyric "If you choose not to decide, you still have made a choice." We sometimes let fear of failure paralyze us, but at the end of the day, we can all choose to be free. And there is a certainty that freedom brings us that exceeds all of our expectations.
Freewill--Rush
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