Free to Be – A Passover Story

I’m going to tell you a story.

Once there was a group of people who heard rumors there would be a famine, and so they followed their fear and headed to the city to take a job with the C.E.O who ran the only company in town.  It wasn’t a bad gig at first – they had their own space, personal expression, plenty to eat.  In fact, they prospered.

And that’s when things changed.

Prosperity brought more fear – what if it doesn’t last?  They had plenty to eat… now.  But what if …. ?   The old C.E.O. whose Balanced-Life Policy included equal space for the dreamer and the doer, for material preoccupations as well as time for the soul, was replaced by a new C.E.O. who was obsessed with building and bling.  Under the new C.E.O. the Fear-of-the-Future Strategy was implemented. This meant constructing cities of gold to the sun god, which is to say devoting all time and energy to that which is presumably solid, tangible, not-going-anywhere – in bright light, leaving nothing to chance or mystery.  No more time for dreamers – everyone left the unknown inherent in expressing their own identity and followed their fear into all doing the same work: adding brick after brick, fortifying the mindset of status quo, solidifying that which can be seen, touch, held.

Brick after brick the status quo became ever-more solid until generations later everyone forgot about the days of balance, of the pleasurable quest of seeking meaning and purpose.  They forgot that work without purpose is just effort; that work without individual expression and personal meaning lacks contribution and relationship.  They forgot to pause and notice the miracles in life.

Then they forgot that they forgot.

One day, someone stepped out of the palace.  This maverick who was plucked from the watery realm of dreaming dared to step out of the storyline of fear-of-the-future, and the first thing he sees is a human soul.  One, individual, important, human soul.  Not the masses, not “society”, not “status quo”, or a statistic from an unemployment poll, but one, individual, human being.  As soon as he saw one, individual, human being the palace became a prison, and the people, slaves.

And that’s when everything started to change.

Passover.  It’s as relevant today as it was nearly 3000 years ago.  We’re all trapped by something – an old belief system, expectations, limitations, patterns…  Fear-of-the-future compels us all at one point or another to take up the accepted path of “because Dad wants me to”, “artists can’t make a living”, “people don’t go back to school at 50”, “I’m taking this job because I need health insurance”, or “everyone else in my family went to that university”.  When flung into the wide expanse of ocean we thrash about to find something that looks solid to climb upon.  The problem is, in doing so we forego Selfhood, which makes us slave to someone else’s needs or expectations, slaves to our assumptions, our fears. We forget we know how to swim.

The upcoming Passover holiday is about waking up to what has us in shackles, and breaking the bonds to step freely into a wide-open space of re-creation.  It was a cry for the soul that Moses put to the Pharaoh; and, like Moses, we can step out of the golden-palace of story and reclaim our individuality, rekindle our passions, re-engage with the search for meaning and purpose, and reclaim our freedom to Be. That great exodus to the new land, the beginning again, started with one step – the step out of palace and into recognition of the needs of the inner self.

Challenge questions : What palace has you imprisoned by golden promises of the security of solid foundations?  What happens if you dare to step out of that story for a moment and look inside – is there an aspect of you that has been put under shackles?  What happens if you liberate it?

We’re all Free to Be.  We just have to get out of the way of our own inner Pharaohs and re-write a few policies.

Happy Dreaming!