MARCH 2024 SULLYGRAM:  Strikes me that the most productive thing a person can do when they shed youthful indifference is to ponder life’s most stone-cold fact. In six syllables: you are going to die. No Faustian bargain, no scientific breakthrough to earthly immortality, no spare-part upgrades to a buff eternal you. Peruse all the histoire you want, its hoot and holler and artifacts, books, film, photos, monuments, and then recognize that all humans who sucked up oxygen before the 20^th Century are gone. Every single one (with apologies to Keith Richards). Crickets. Dust.

Now, don’t freak out, I’m not going macabre. Death is totally natural, so whatever is in the next room must be absolutely OK. Maybe the only equality we have comes when our energy separates from our matter. I myself believe in the permanent echo of something, be it energy or consciousness, an identity of soul in a divine plan with myriad manifestations. But that’s neither here nor there, so to speak. I’m writing now about our blink-of-an-eye lifespans on this tiny bit of real estate in the vast cosmos.

So, once you shed youthful indifference to having a shelf life, a rough plan may be in order lest your bucket list fit into a fortune cookie. You could run around, wander, seek out pleasures. Or just follow the herd – always a popular choice. Food, shelter and sex will be fundamental drivers, of course. Do you conform to the social order you were born into? Are you a rebel, a maverick, an independent thinker? Maybe you go through life in fits and starts, changing paths, a buffet of everything. Guilt and fear dominate the course for many; love and acceptance dominate for too few. But if there’s a lynchpin that consistently locks our actions, attitudes and choices together, it’s…I can’t say it. Well, what the hell. Lots of phrases say the same thing, even though it comes down to semantics. Let me refine it this way: the core reflex that molds our lives is our tolerance (or intolerance) for freedom.

…tolerance for freedom in one’s self and in others. Or to put it negatively, where does your insecurity begin? How much control do you need of your life in order to feel safe in taking risks or in the riskiness of others? The less control you need, the more freedom you enjoy; but, of course, more isn’t always better. The degree of it is a key element in relationships, cultures, religions, societies and national underpinnings, if you think about it. Laws and agreements try to strictly manage freedoms, while morality (possibly the most changeable and misused concept on the planet) does the same thing more passively. Morality seeks to grant us permissions, but it also clucks at freedom by weaponizing values, mores, customs, traditions, styles, habits, rites, facades, etc. That said, the concept of freedom doesn’t just apply to degrees of social conformity through laws and morality. It goes to the heart of personality, individuality and creativity.

Artists, discoverers, innovators, inventors, entrepreneurs – transitional people – all seize the freedom to be different. They break the mold, let go the tether. Much risk of failure there. At a minimum, they could be wrong or rejected or ignored. Or more stingingly, they could face derision, scorn, loss of time and fortune. But for those whose need to take a risk is bred in the bone, society’s fickle castigations mean little compared to stagnation within themselves. The true connoisseur of freedom sooner or later recognizes that even money and fame can lead to dead ends in one’s soul. A very wealthy person I knew who summed themselves up as “I climbed Mount Moolah” found that the view from the top left nowhere to go. Another, whose fame was locked into decades-old recognition, felt paralyzed and unable to grow. Actors, musicians, performers may search out directing, writing or producing in order to have more freedom in their labors. In less glamorous professions, employees climb the ladder with an eye toward reaching the penthouse and enjoying a greater latitude. 

In my own humble kicking out against life’s smaller cocoons, I think I realized early-on that I wanted freedom for its own sake. One of my fantasies in sports was that if I knew I was about to set a world record while following that black line on the bottom of a swimming pool, I would stop before I touched the finish pad. You could call me an expert on failure in a lot of venues, but freedom never let me down. Even writing morphed into something exclusionary. The early successes I had came out of traditional New York publishing, and no doubt a good deal of my ego and material dreams were contained between the covers. I know that because when e-books came along, meaning that virtually anyone could become a self-published author, it dampened my motivation.

Ironically, I got it back when I read somewhere that if the shelf space in the Library of Congress was a road, it would stretch over 850 miles! The foot or so my books occupy suddenly didn’t mean much. Guess you could call my contribution a pothole. But when you vacate recognition, liberty takes the throne. On the other side of that pothole was a whole new world of anonymous freedom. I began ghost-writing for famous people, and that set me free from the three stages in human motivation that I saw in them and in myself. Put simplistically, most of us start out chasing sex, love and money; then in mid-life we want control over all the things that frustrate us in careers and relationships; and finally, fully seasoned, we seek a meaning to it all that justifies the choices we’ve made and who we are.

For the ghost-writer, or any freedom junkie, that anonymity is the pinnacle, a fulfillment of a life-long quest to escape clichés, groupthink and social conditioning. You become “a real boy, Pinocchio” – free of strings! Identity is still relative, of course, but purposely disregarding one’s place in pecking orders drains away everything repressive and can even change the actuarials that turn people into statistics. There is amnesty in that, an autonomy from rules that unleashes energy, optimism and creativity. In a way, it’s a Fountain of Youth. If you can’t avoid earthly death, you can at least minimize the decline and decay that people so often surrender themselves into through society’s myths about aging. The great Pablo Casals, who lived to age 97, had the perspective to transcend such shackling mind-sets. When, at age 81, he married 20-year-old Marta and someone pointed out the obvious, he said, “I look at it this way, if she dies, she dies.” He also kept practicing his music daily well into his 90s and when asked why, famously replied: “I think I’m making progress.” That’s freedom down to the grace note.
 

A few photos below… 

Thomas "Sully" Sullivan