Freedom and Duties

Freedom and Duties

The concept of freedom is always perhaps misunderstood as some right given to an individual to have no boundaries or nothing to limit his desires (good or bad).  But I think it’s not so, How can u quantify freedom without boundary or limit, or even how can u define it.  For example u can say I have the freedom to stay awake! Fine, how long? You have to answer it and it can’t be indefinite for sure. This means you have a limit.

“Freedom is power, rights, or whatever given to you with a pre defined boundaries”.

When I say pre defined or pre determined boundaries, it necessarily need not be stipulated by someone, it’s well and good if you have your own. Which makes things lot easier.

Mahatma Gandhi says “Let each do his duty…… what we want to do should be done, not because we object the English or because we want to retaliate but because it is our duty to do so.” (CWMG – Vol 10, p. 64)

Sometimes we don’t understand this, maybe we can’t, even if we try to, like when we were in schools. The boundaries protect us basically, in schools, children are asked to come in uniform, perhaps when you were in school you thought they are trying to boss around you, depriving you from the freedom of dressing. But actually, now we know it’s just to make us learn the professional way of dressing, also to create the oneness among the children and learn not to see any difference between their peer groups. In that situation where you can’t make a clear decision that if the rules and limitation are necessary or not we just have to trust people who lay it. Sometimes we may not know about the rules but you may know about the decision makers so we can trust them.

Am not saying that we should blindly  accept all the restrictions laid upon us and bend for everything, rules should be made for us and by us, not by someone else and squeezed upon us! Rules have to be reasoned out, but we should have the maturity to understand the rules, and also to reason it. For that first we should have the mind set to accept to have rules.

When a child refuses to accept her mom telling her what to do and what not to do, she had to be explained, and she needs to understand it.  Once the child understands the rules she will start to feel the freedom! This is applies everywhere, once a subordinate accepts to understand the boundaries lay before him, he no more thinks he is deprived of freedom.

When you are the rule maker for yourself, the determiner of your own boundaries, think of your environment you are gonna live, the people who are going to be affected by this, before framing it. It is mostly perfect when you decide to have your own limitation and boundaries, because most of the time that will be correct.

Okay now there is a problem, you follow the rules, and you see people around you or even your higher authority in any form, mom to boss in your office, don’t follow the rules that they should follow. As said before do your duty and you will be served, don’t mind them don’t follow bad example, set up a good example, by you will be served I meant you will be respected and they would be even afraid to order you because you are perfect and they know they are not.

 And we should always try to see the duty of others through their own eyes, the environments change the nature of our duties, and doing the duty which is ours at any particular time is the best thing we can do in this world. We shall not concern ourselves with others duties and the way they do it, we are not the standard of the universe.

Okay what if sometimes the rule maker, the determiner of boundaries is not you, and he or she takes a wrong decision, there are different ways to deal it. You can Fight for it, simply adapt with it, Try to make them understand, everything depends upon the situation and environment. I really don’t have an answer for this one, I really welcome people reading this to post their answers for this.