Tomorrow Everyone Celebrates Freedom. What Does Yours Look Like?
Tomorrow there will be fireworks.
Parades. Flags. Backyard gatherings and the smell of something on the grill and the particular feeling that comes with a holiday built around a single enormous idea.
Freedom.
Two hundred and fifty years of it. The most celebrated political achievement in human history marked every year with the kind of collective joy that reminds you why the experiment was worth attempting in the first place.
And then Monday arrives and most people walk straight back into the systems controlling their lives without a second thought.
Not political systems. Personal ones.
The system that told you your cholesterol number means you need a prescription for the rest of your life. The system that invented snacking and convinced you that eating between meals is responsible. The system that told you the joint pain is just aging and the surgery is inevitable and the slowdown is coming for everyone so you might as well get comfortable with it.
The system that told you a glass of red wine was good for your heart while the research it was based on was comparing sick people to less sick people and calling it science.
These are not small things. They are the invisible walls of a different kind of dependency. One that does not look like dependency because everyone around you is inside the same walls and nobody is calling it captivity.
The founders did not accept the arrangement they were born into. They looked at it clearly, named what it was doing to them, and decided it was no longer acceptable.
That is available to you too. Not just tomorrow. Today.
What are you still accepting about your health that you have never actually examined? What has the system told you is inevitable that you have never questioned? What prescription, what diagnosis, what story about your age or your body or your genetics have you been carrying because someone in a position of authority handed it to you and you never thought to hand it back?
I was 55 years old with a body the system had already written the next chapter for. Seven surgeries. A lifetime of medications. A managed decline that everyone around me accepted as normal because it was normal. Because most people were on the same road.
I got off the road.
Tomorrow is July 4th. Two hundred and fifty years of a declaration that started with people deciding the arrangement was no longer acceptable.
Today is a good time to think about yours.