Today is the 4th of July, a day when American’s celebrate their independence and freedom. Given today’s issues with COVID and BLM I have been spending a lot of time thinking about freedom. What is freedom?

I really struggle with this idea of freedom because I realize that so many people feel oppressed. A government that is too large and is over reaching provides a sense of oppression. A system that apparently keeps a strangle hold on the underrepresented minority provides a sense of oppression. A desire to be right at the expense of being compassionate provides a sense of oppression. So how do we free ourselves from this oppression?

When asked, Google defines freedom as “the power or right to act, speak, or think as one wants without hindrance or restraint.” I read this and I think ultimately we all want this, but at the same time fear what “without hindrance or restraint” means. Are we really saying we want the freedom to be allowed to harm others? Are we really saying we want the freedom to do as we please without any restrictions on our behavior?

In an ideal world, freedom would be just that, the freedom to do exactly as we pleased without anyone giving us rules or “making” us do something different. In an ideal world we wouldn’t need restrictions. So why do we have them?

Perhaps we never mastered it, but at some point we stopped looking deeply and continued to live on the surface. We bounce from experience to experience seeing only the change and experiencing only the surface. This surface experience has us on an emotional rollercoaster experiencing joy in one moment and despair in another. We are overpowered by our emotion, not experiencing it but becoming it and defining our life experience by that emotion. We are, in fact, slaves to our emotional state. As long as we are living as slaves to our surface emotion we can never be free.

We mistake freedom for “happiness.” We feel free and unencumbered when we are happy so instead of searching for freedom we seek comfort and happiness. Only, these feelings are fleeting and don’t remain, thus we have to seek freedom in another and different way.

As long as we are seeking the next comfortable thing, it is impossible to trust ourselves to do the right thing, and thus impossible to trust someone else to do the right thing. We are defining freedom as what makes ME happy/comfortable in this moment. This means we will do selfish and hurtful things in the name of freedom.

On the other hand, when we gain personal mastery and are no long controlled by our emotions, but can experience them without being overpowered by them, we can experience true freedom. We are now the masters rather than the slaves. This allows us to have compassion, respect, understanding and trust for our fellow humans.

The first step toward finding this freedom? Gratitude. When we look for the things for which we are grateful our outlook changes. The world is much less dim.

The second step toward freedom? The realization that the only person over which you have any control is you. You can control your words, your actions, your thoughts. You have no control over what anyone else does, but you have complete control over what you do. You can choose to let things slide and live free from another’s expectations. You can choose to walk proudly in your truth. You can choose to succumb and rise to the bait someone offers you to be other than someone you are proud to be.

Freedom can only come when you realize that you can’t control the ever changing world, but you can control your response to it. You can always choose to act/speak/think in a way that lets you be proud of yourself.

So…I am really good at ideas, I am really bad at implementing them. I love the getting started, the planning, the thinking, etc. I find myself struggling with the “hard work” part of getting something off the ground and fledged.

That said, I am in a situation where we need storage and we need it fast, so I am building a shed. For $1000 more I could have had it installed, but I am an engineer. I can build this thing. And the truth is, I love projects that have me working with my hands. I don’t do them enough. So, a shed it is.

To put in a shed, one must first create a level and square (not in shape in the fact that it has 90 degree corners) base. This is time consuming, hard, and frustrating. This is the reason most people hire someone else. This kind of detail work takes patience and requires work that I just typically want to avoid. Hard work means frustration. Hard work means effort. Hard work means time. It is so much easier to blindly scroll social media (and beat myself up about how no one really likes or comments on my posts…another story for another time).

My gate has been falling down for years. My yard is a mass of holes and sinkholes from bad fill. And like most yards it is NOT perfectly level.

But I am determined to build anyway. It will be a fun project. I hope.

At the end of the first day of work…at least 5 hours…What I have are 12 “holes” dug out of the grass and loose topsoil for each of my supports to take the weight of the structure and the stuff I will be putting in it. I managed to get 6 supports in and level.

Each of those concrete posts weighs at least 40 pounds, the block at least 30 and the bags of gravel were 50 lbs too. Digging in the dirt isn’t all that easy either. I learned a lot in day 1 about getting these blocks level.

It only took about 4 hours to get the last 6 blocks level and in place. I won’t say it was easy, I did cry and I did want to quit, I did have a lot of beating myself up because of both of those things. It did require another trip to Lowe’s because I broke 2 concrete blocks and I needed more gravel and sand, but at this point every thing is near to the correct place, and level! But the truth is, that it isn’t over yet. I need to make sure the floor base is in and square.

Here is where the tedious work begins. Making a base is easy, just follow directions. Making it square is much more difficult. It is super easy to make a parallelogram, the wood naturally warps, the nails allow for flex. I can get everything in and measured correctly, but it will still be 2-3 inches off square. Every step requires pausing and remeasuring.

To most of us, things that are “close enough” look square, unless something is obviously tilted an inch or two doesn’t make much of a difference out of 12 feet. However, when you are building a structure, being off square by even an inch is a very big deal. It makes everything else so much harder.

With a base that isn’t square, I will either build a structure square and it will look terrible because the base is off and now things don’t line up. Or I will have to do a lot of extra work to mold and cut everything to make it look square, even though it isn’t. Either way, the fact that I didn’t take the time to put in a solid foundation is going to hurt me in the end.

So, I took the extra couple of hours of hard work and sweat to fine tune the location of the blocks to make sure that the base was square and level.

I am sore today and there is still a lot to do, and I can only hope that my hard work paid off, but I have a foundation I should now be able to build on.