Imagine a baby seeing the beautiful glow of the fire and wanting to touch it but the mother prevents it and it cries. The baby wonders why the mother is not allowing it to touch something it knows is beautiful. But the honest love of the mother knows the baby would be hurt so she prevents it. This is how most at times our agitation for freedom contradicts the protection from honest love.
As humans, right from birth, we grow up with our own fantasies and pleasures. We question our surroundings and sometimes we want to tamper with them to satisfy our curiosity. When we are prevented, it annoys us. We even question ourselves more, and the more the question, the more the fantasy grows.
Take the Bible story of Adam and Eve for instance. God gives Adam and Eve access to eat from every other tree apart from the tree in the middle of the garden. I mean you have numerous trees to eat from why bother about only one tree. But that’s the human in us, the fact that, they are prevented from eating from the particular tree, is reason to pay attention to it. Perhaps maybe if they were not told about the forbidden tree, they would eat from every other tree and not even notice the tree. But they were told, they were tempted and they ate from it.
This is the situation in most of our homes, friendships, schools and wherever we find ourselves. There are forbidden trees that we are prevented from eating from(rules and restrictions). But we question these rules, we are tempted to break the rules(fantasy). Or sometimes we sneakingly break them and we enjoy it(pleasures). We question these restrictions because we simply want to know why they exist.
Actions come with consequences. We do not know the consequences of our action until we actually do them to gain the experience. And when the experience is bad, we would not want people we genuinely love to go through them too. That is how restrictions are established from love… for our own protection. But we all want to have our own experiences before we learn.
We may rebel against the restrictions and try out our fantasies and those fantasies may come out as pleasurable. Sometimes the consequences of our actions take time to show. But the person who loves you restricts you because they have knowledge about the consequence.
When the consequences of our pleasure delay, we enjoy our fantasies. It makes us happy. We feel it does not affect us or anybody else yet we are restricted, so we agitate for our freedom. We try to free ourselves from the restrictions. Just like the baby cries when the mother prevents it from touching the fire.
We focus on freeing ourselves from the rules and restrictions but are we free from our fantasies or pleasures. Can we live without them? If we can’t live without that pleasure then where is the freedom? The pleasure in itself restricts us.
We fight to free ourselves from the protective restrictions of honest love into the restrictions of our pleasures. Pleasures that could harm us in latter days. Is it worth it?
