Freedom.

The other evening I was driving Along the Palm Crescent at sunset. The same road I drive every day. For the past couple of months, I’ve watched the sun disappear into the Gulf from that stretch of road. Most evenings I barely notice it.

I was thinking about the next thing. The next task. The next conversation. The next day.

Then the sun caught me.

Low over the water. Full and orange.

I almost drove straight past it.

That is the part that stayed with me. Not the sunset. The fact that I nearly missed it.

So I pulled over. I sat. And I watched.

The sun disappeared into the Gulf. The colours slowly drained from the sky. Darkness arrived without asking permission. A few minutes. Nothing more.

As I sat there watching the light disappear, I found myself thinking about how much of life is spent holding on. Holding on to plans. Holding on to certainty. Holding on to the idea that if we grip tightly enough, we can keep things exactly as they are.

Most of us are taught this early. Work hard. Stay strong. Don’t let go.

And to be fair, a closed hand can build a lot. Careers. Businesses. Families. Reputations.

The closed hand gets things done.

The problem comes when the hand never opens.

Because after a while we stop holding things. The things start holding us.

The role. The expectation. The old grievance. The future we’ve imagined. The version of life we think we should be living.

We carry them everywhere. And because everyone around us is doing the same thing, it starts to feel normal.

Life, however, has other ideas.

Life has a way of prising open your fingers. Not all at once. Over years.

A relationship ends. Children grow up. Parents get older. Plans change. People leave. The version of yourself you thought would last forever quietly disappears.

For a long time I saw these moments as losses. Things to resist. Things to fix. Things to hold onto for a little longer.

Now I’m not so sure.

Maybe they are life’s way of teaching us something the closed hand can never learn.

That not everything is ours to keep. That control is often an illusion. That freedom and holding on are rarely travelling in the same direction.

Sitting there that evening, watching the last of the light disappear beyond the horizon, nothing was asking anything of me. The sunset didn’t need improving. Tomorrow didn’t need solving.

For a few minutes I wasn’t reaching for anything. I wasn’t gripping anything. I was simply there.

The traffic kept moving. Tomorrow still arrived. The demands of life remained exactly where I left them.

But something had shifted.

Not around me.

Inside me.

Maybe that is where freedom starts. Not when we finally get everything we want. Not when life becomes predictable. Not when the future feels secure.

Maybe freedom begins the moment we stop demanding that life gives us guarantees it was never designed to give.

So this week, take a look at what you’re carrying. The worry. The expectation. The story you’ve been telling yourself. The thing you’re gripping so tightly.

And ask yourself whether it’s still serving you.

Or whether you’re serving it.

We spend so much of our lives reaching for the next thing. The next achievement. The next solution. The next version of ourselves.

But perhaps freedom is not found in what we manage to hold on to.

Perhaps it arrives the moment we stop gripping so tightly.

Open your hand.

See how that feels.

Big love
Chris