The Fragility of Freedom & Connection

In April, when I was in Vietnam, we joined a group tour, which in it of itself is super fun.  People are always interested in where you are from and trying to find shared experiences. Inevitably, talk about what is taking place in the US comes up. There was a gentleman from Hong Kong who chatted with me separately. At one point, he said that what was taking place in the US shows us that “democracy doesn't work”. 

I had a pretty visceral reaction to that. I grew up learning about our founding fathers and their desire to be self governed. This gentleman, who came from a country that was significantly older than the US and had been ruled by the same monarchy we fought against until about 29 years ago when it became part of China, got what I assume is a different version of our story. 

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Since that day, I have spent so much time thinking about his comment and tried to understand why I reacted the way I did. 

The United States becoming a country was one of the largest social experiments in history. To be self governed, to protect economic and religious freedoms, to grant all citizens the rights of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness? Unheard of 250 years ago.

And today? Some of those rights seem to be waning. Maybe he was right, maybe democracy doesn't work.   

Except the US Constitution was written to “form a more perfect Union”. Even our forefathers knew this wasn't going to be a perfect scenario. They knew democracy was… fragile. 

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If you aren't a soccer fan and/or have sworn off social media, you may not know that the World Cup is currently taking place in North America. Games are being held in Canada, the US and Mexico. We have visitors from all over the world coming to our shores for games and the hosts and visitors are having a blast (do yourself a favor and check out how the University of Kansas adopted the Algerian team and the South Korean visitors in Mexico, it is heartwarming). 

Right now, we are seeing some of the best versions of humanity - we may come from different places and cheer for different teams, but at the end of the day, we’re more the same than we are different (and we all love ranch dressing). 

The World Cup is a healthy reminder that when we come together, we can make meaningful connections and our lives are better for it. 

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But when we work against each other, our fragile ecosystems fracture. Freedom. Human connection. None of it maintains itself. We have to work to maintain it every day. 

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The same goes for our own lives - both personally or professionally. Either we are choosing our path or someone is choosing it for us. 

Many of us have put parts of our lives on auto-pilot - our finances that we know we should look at but are embarrassed to see how “behind” we are, our careers where we don’t see a path forward at our current company but stay anyway, or even in our relationships with family, where certain behaviors hurt us, they are our family so we let it persist. 

Not going after what we need or want keeps everyone else’s ecosystem stable, but inside of ourselves, there are little earthquakes happening. 

The little earthquakes add up. And the longer we ignore them, the bigger the fault lines get.  The bravest thing we can do for ourselves is opt into our lives again. 

Freedom IS fragile. So is connection. They are worth the effort, both personally and collectively.  

-Kristina