The Blurb
Free to be stuck
Sunday 11 July 2010 12.04 am
Who is freer: someone with more restrictions, or someone with more choices?
When I left university with a good degree, I could go anywhere in the world and train for almost any job I wanted. I had almost unlimited choice, and felt totally paralysed.
Seven years later, I've narrowed my field to Web design, and I'm looking forward to getting a permanent job in a particular place. I'm placing restrictions on myself, and I love it. In fact, the more decisions I make, the more relaxed I feel. The fewer my options become, the lower my anxiety about making mistakes. With a thousand life-changing decisions, I can hardly breathe, but with just a few, I have energy to live.
It's possibly life's greatest paradox. The fewer my choices, the freer I become. (Ask any bride and groom in this wedding season why they're restricting their options!)
Is Christianity, with its guidelines for life, really a straitjacket? I find society often imposes harsher rules on the way I should behave than Jesus does, and his give me a real sense of freedom. I believe in God of course, but even if I were to find at the end of my life that he didn't exist after all, I would have lost nothing. True freedom is a real win-win, and I recommend it to anyone.
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