“Life Is Beautiful ” Tells Us About The Freedom That Gives Us Meaning
Sometimes I am yours, and sometimes from the wind, says Alejandro Sanz. And it is that we move in an annoyed balance, between surrendering ourselves and not belonging. In the balance that has in one of its dishes the desire to protect our freedom, the one we use to be generous and feel comforted by the fact of being able to be. In the other dish, the knowledge that “not belonging means not having” and “not having means recognizing the freedom of the other” so that they can leave whenever they want.
We love the freedom of choice, but at the same time many choices are complicated and difficult. Crossroads and complicated tessitura in which we would gladly give them back to play . It seems that in that same place, where we have to think about which path to take, very strong currents converge. Of air, that agitate us.
Freedom gives us meaning
“Man in search of his meaning” is one of those works that we should all read sometime, whether by right or by mistake. Its author, Viktor Frankl, was one of the many Jews who suffered firsthand in the concentration camps of Nazi Germany.
They can ration our food, force us to work all day, punish us with beatings or threaten us with death, as the Nazis did with their prisoners, but what those heartless people could not do was control the hope of those who woke up every day, in the midst of that hell, with the will to survive. Viktor Frankl tells us, with all the crudeness, that those who made use of this freedom and did not abandon themselves, were the ones who best tolerated those conditions.
From literature, to cinema, to one of the most wonderful films ever made: “Life is beautiful.” Guido preserves this freedom and does it so that little Giosuè does not realize what is really happening around him. In fact, Guido tries to keep his son in mind at all times that they have chosen to be there and that at any moment they can leave. Understand that your child can bear anything except losing freedom.
The other side of freedom
Freedom is the greatest of individual powers. At this moment there is nothing material that prevents you from going out and giving someone a hug or taking an apple from a greengrocer and running away.
This means that our life is not a multiple choice test, but a big question with an open answer. We have even more options in it than the language itself gives us to fill in a blank page.
Studies tell us that after a certain number, when the number of options we have skyrockets, negative feelings can appear, such as frustration. A frustration that arises from the impotence of not having sufficient cognitive resources to be able to make a comprehensive and exhaustive assessment of the situation.
For example, marketers know that an excessive offer of options causes the consumer to need to move away from the place where it is exposed, without taking any of the products. On the one hand, you feel that you want to choose the best product, on the other hand you want to choose the best one for your needs and, finally, you are overwhelmed by the fact that you do not have the necessary fifteen minutes to look in detail at the offer made by all the brands.
Freedom contains a beautiful paradox
The same one that rescues us from horror may be the same one that saturates us as consumers. It is the paradox of freedom. In any case, as much as it may overwhelm us, the struggle to achieve it has been a war that has lasted for centuries and that man has fought against man himself.
In this way, I encourage you to enjoy yourself, to use intuition in small decisions and to value any kind gesture that another gives you in the use of their freedom. Because this is in the end the magic magnifying glass that separates what has value, from what does not have it and, in case of not finding anything of the former, it allows us to create it.
