Maybe I Had Freedom All Wrong
For most of my adult life, freedom has been one of my highest values. I’ve worked hard to create a life with flexibility, financial security, and a fair amount of control over my own time. After years of running businesses, raising kids, and carrying plenty of responsibility, the idea of reaching a point where I didn’t have to work sounded pretty darn good.
And then, recently, after eighteen months of "retirement," I got a part-time job.
Not because I needed a new career. Not because I had some grand professional ambition I was itching to pursue. And certainly not because I woke up one morning thinking, "You know what would make my life better? Less control over my calendar."
I got a job because I had begun to notice something about myself: too much completely unstructured time wasn’t making me happier. I wanted more interaction with people. I wanted something that stimulated my brain. I wanted somewhere to go and something to engage with that had absolutely nothing to do with my own business. Plus, I wanted a reason to wear makeup again! LOL
So somewhat on a whim, I started working part-time as a front desk associate at a local wellness studio.
And I love it.
That has surprised me enough that I’ve been paying attention to why I love it.
I like getting up and knowing I have somewhere to be. I like interacting with clients and my coworkers. I like learning new systems, figuring things out, selling something I believe is genuinely helpful and solving the dozen little problems that pop up during a shift. I even discovered during one particularly crazy day—when the internet went down and virtually everything we use to run the studio lives in the cloud—that apparently I enjoy the challenge when I have to figure out how to make things work anyway.
What’s especially interesting is that this job has none of the things I once would have associated with a successful career. There’s no impressive title involved. I’m not building an empire. I’m not trying to climb a ladder. And I don't need the job to tell me anything about who I am or what I’m capable of.
I just like doing it.
There is something incredibly freeing about that.
Maybe that's one of the gifts of this stage of life. For so many years, our work can carry an enormous amount of weight. It provides income. It builds our résumé or reputation. It may support a family. We want to succeed, advance, achieve, build or prove ourselves. Even when we genuinely enjoy our work, there's often a lot riding on it.
This feels completely different.
I can evaluate this job using a much simpler question: Does having this in my life make my life better?
Right now, the answer is an enthusiastic yes.
And that has caused me to rethink something bigger: my definition of freedom.
I think I used to equate freedom with having fewer obligations. The ultimate luxury was an empty calendar and the ability to wake up every morning and decide exactly what I wanted to do.
And don't get me wrong. I still love an empty calendar. I love traveling. I love slow mornings and long walks and having absolutely nowhere I need to be. I have no intention of becoming so scheduled that I need to make an appointment with myself to sit on the porch.
But I'm discovering that unlimited free time isn't necessarily the same thing as freedom. In fact, sometimes having something I want to be responsible for makes the rest of my free time feel even better.
Maybe freedom isn't about eliminating obligations.
Maybe it's about having enough choice to decide which obligations are worth having.
That feels like a pretty important distinction.
It has also reminded me how easy it is to become attached to our own ideas about what a good life is supposed to look like. We work toward something for years and naturally assume we'll know exactly how to live once we get there. Once I have more time, I'll love having more time. Once I don't have to work, of course I won't want to work.
But what if we get there and discover something different?
We can either insist that we should like the life we imagined—or we can pay attention to the life we're actually experiencing.
That, to me, is where discernment comes in.
What gives me energy? What drains it? What am I looking forward to? What am I doing simply because I've decided this is what someone in my position is supposed to want? What am I learning about myself now that I couldn't have known five or ten years ago?
Those answers don't have to match the answers I gave in an earlier season of my life.
In fact, I hope they don't always match. We're allowed to change our minds about what a good life looks like.
That's not evidence that we got it wrong before. We're different. Our circumstances are different. We've learned things. We've experienced things. And sometimes the only way to discover whether something belongs in our lives is to try it and notice what happens.
I certainly didn't predict that working a few afternoons a week at a wellness studio would teach me something about freedom. But that's one of the things I love about consciously participating in life instead of trying to design the whole thing in advance.
You get to be surprised.
Maybe thriving isn't finally reaching a place where nothing is required of us. Maybe it's having enough freedom to choose what we want to be responsible for—and enough self-awareness to change our minds when we discover that something we didn't think we wanted actually makes our life better.
Want to explore what’s actually working in your life—and what might be ready for a rethink? My free Thrive Discernment Guide offers a simple process for separating what’s true from the stories and assumptions we’ve built around it, so you can make choices from greater clarity. You can download your free copy here.
