Are You Missing Out On Freedom?
Last Thursday, I was halfway through my morning writing session when I got up to make my flat white. Coming back around the corner with my coffee in hand – I was struck by this beautiful scene. The sun was shining through the open windows, sparkling off the glass table. The cheese plant blowing in the fan, my laptop open and waiting for me to write this post. Our cat, Mango, chilling in the sun underneath the piano.
I wasn’t making money, I wasn’t even on some grand adventure, I looked at these simple objects, the piano, the coffee, the laptop, all sparkling in the sun and I realised then, life is wild.
Wild: (Of a place or region) uninhabited, uncultivated, or inhospitable.
That afternoon, I Googled what does wild mean – after all, it is four of the twelve characters of our business name. At first Google I was okay with the above definition, but before long I wasn’t. The concept that wild is a physical place that is uninhabited was squashed for me when we watched 1883. This prequel to the famous Yellowstone TV show, follows the Dutton family’s perilous journey westward through the Great Plains of America in the late 19th century. They seek a new life in Montana, but to get there they must face hardship, violence, and the harsh realities of frontier survival.
When you start watching 1883, you can clearly see how wild the journey is for the travellers. But, it isn’t uninhabited and inhospitable. People have lived across the Great Plains for over 10,000 years. It’s clear from countless stories in history that when we say something is wild, we rarely mean a complete lack of humanity in a place. The word has come to mean something more than that, that a wild place does not belong to all, but to the beholder.
Three years ago, I was loving my work at Heinz in Thailand. It was full of meetings, deadlines, teamwork, excitement.
Then I saw a twinkling light that showed me a passion. A passion I had always had but never reflected on. Within weeks of arriving in Bangkok, I was privileged to join the leadership team’s development program. It was being run by this slightly unconventional Australian man – larger than life, funny, magnetic. He talked about topics I already knew but had never known in a work environment. Topics he called strengths, that I knew as bright spots from my bookshelves and courses at business school.
This was the first time I had seen someone doing a job that meshed with some passions that had been infiltrating my mind for a decade. Over the next two years the twinkling light turned into the inevitable and I joined this Australian, Mick, at his wonderful organisation 2b Limitless. I remember the terror of starting my new career. Going from finance to freelance coach, there were going to be days when I would not be in a bustling office, there would be less teamwork. I would be alone, sat at my laptop.
Book a complementary chemistry
session with Pat.
This was seriously wild for me. Being alone was to be wilder than walking the Nile or conquering the American frontiers. In the 21st century, sat behind our laptops, wild does not have to mean climbing Mount Everest, it does not have to be physical.
Which leads me onto my third point about wild. Imagine your eight-year-old self - eating sweets or travelling on a plane was probably pretty insane for your little brain.
I’ll never forget the pre 9-11 days when happy birthday was sung to me on the way to Disneyland – talk about a wild experience for a child. If Haribo and air travel excites an eight-year-old, your 20-year-old’s wild was probably some form of hedonistic pleasure. For me that was experiencing new places, new cultures, new environments, new foods[1] and other less polite things.
What comes after the wild of childhood Haribo and teenage hedonism? For me, it is the simple moments of sipping a coffee and working in the sun. For you it is probably something different, but I bet it boils down into the realisation that you are able to do what you want. For me wild has become synonymous with freedom. The psychiatrist and holocaust survivor Victor Frankl captured it better than anyone:
Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms – to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way… It is this spiritual freedom – which cannot be taken away – that makes life meaningful and purposeful[2].
What is truly wild is doing exactly what you want to do. Free of the baggage of judgement – positive and negative – from others. When we are 5, 10, 15 and 20, someone has always laid out the next steps for us. Then something happens when we move through our twenties. We let go of that belief that everything is decided for us. Instead, we realise that it’s always been our choice. No, you may not be able to buy a Ferrari or be the President of Argentina tomorrow, but you do have the freedom to do choose your action right in this present moment. Then in the next moment, you again have the freedom to choose.
It’s your choice what you call wild. It isn’t up to your parents, your teachers, your friends, or even your bosses. It’s your choice if wild means writing, travelling, or building an amazing career at a large organisation.
Because wild: true wild, lives in the most free and inhospitable parts of your own mind.
Deepen Your Curiosity
Levison Wood writes in Walking the Nile: “the question of what it [exploration] means in the modern world isn’t so easy to answer… in a world of Google Maps, where every valley and hillside has already been plotted, the traditional age of exploration is certainly gone. But exploration has always been about more than pure discovery, or of being the first to do something. The famous Victorian explorers were, of course, not the first into Africa; Africa is a continent where mankind has lived for longer than any other… where civilisations had existed for millennia.”
Victor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning.
You can find both 1883 and Yellowstone on Netflix UK.
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[1] Hedonism is the view that pleasure is the ultimate good, with ancient philosophers dividing over what kind of pleasure should guide a good life: the Cyrenaics celebrated immediate, bodily pleasures, while the Epicureans emphasized moderation, friendship, and long-term tranquillity. The modern use of epicurean – to describe indulgence in fine food, wine, and luxury – actually misrepresents Epicurus’ teaching. Far from advocating lavish living, Epicurus urged simplicity, arguing that excess often breeds pain rather than happiness. Ironically, the modern sense of epicurean is closer to Cyrenaic hedonism, which prioritized intense, momentary pleasures of the body, whereas Epicureanism sought enduring contentment through modest living and peace of mind.
[2] P66 & 67 Man’s Search for Meaning by Victor Frankl.
