Freedom from what had become a slavish job, working unappreciated with/by great numbers of people–2002.
Freedom from full-time work–2005.
Freedom from any negative people–2010
Freedom is, first of all, largely related to being from the 9 to 5, then from any job at all in which one is working for others. (Freedom, basically, has to do with freedom from illness and health problems, of course.) Freedom from debt is a somewhat limited comfort if one is living cheaply, meanly, and limitedly; like why isn’t that person spending money to pursue his or her bliss and passions or getting free/r of a limited focus or obsession on Mammon?
Freedom from negative relationships is a very big deal. Being one’s own person or being capable of autonomy and being responsible for oneself are also basic and important.
Then you are into varying degrees of freedom, spending your time and days as you wish, able, on a dime, to go and do something you want to, able to get something or some experience you desire suddenly.
All my life, right from my latch-key-kid years in grades 1-12 and university days, has contained harbingers of this kind of total, desired freedom. My adult years had much freedom with the 3 months of holiday during the teacher years. My past 12 years retired from teaching have been wonderfully and leisurely free. Freedom, for me, at this point, continues to grow and and offers enough deep spiritual fulfillment as long as my health-luck continues.
If someone asks me, What’s the most important thing in a person’s life, the answer is still the same–freedom. It is the very thing that others have envied me all the way through my life at different stages. I did what I wanted and have lived my life largely, very largely, on my own terms. For me, this has been the ideal and the best of who I am and what I have been and experienced. If someone said There are other ways, I would say Yes, I know and have seen these up close. But they never interested me as much as the way I have lived, based on freedom, consciousness, beauty, Nature, love, and possibilities. But freedom has allowed me to enjoy, understand, and appreciate all the other aspects in that latter list. With less freedom, my life would have been greatly diminished and ‘smallened’. I never wanted a limited, limiting life. Especially because of the limits and limitations of others and the limits they live by or suggested and sometimes foisted on me.
“I am large; I contain multitudes.”–Walt Whitman