Equilibrium

I've been going through some boxes that I have been lugging around, unopened, through several moves. I estimate some of them to have been untouched for nearly 8 years. In one of them, I found a primitive wooden kite reel. The kite that goes with it belonged to my dad, a father's day request made in his late 40's that had baffled me at the time. After his passing, just a few years later, I asked to keep the kite. I knew it to be meaningful, not the item itself, but what it represented to him. I remember the faraway look and dreamy half-smile on his face when he was flying it. I always thought that one day I would figure it out.

***

I have just gotten two speeding tickets within 10 days of each other. One would think that I would have learned my lesson by now but clearly not, and it makes me wonder: if the payoff is big enough, the behavior won't change. So what makes it worth it to me? What is my payoff? Highway driving at high speed puts me in a trance. I feel like I could escape, if I just kept going. Of course, the real cage is in my head: my responsibilities and conscience would follow me anywhere, but somehow, while those luminous white strips on the dark pavement fly by, forever faster, I am able to block that out.

The quest for freedom is a wild goose chase. Shaping the very concept of freedom is already a challenge in itself. Its definition, for me, has evolved over the course of my few decades. In my teens, freedom was backpacking around the world. In my twenties, it was a steady income and my own apartment. In my thirties, it's been learning to forgive myself. Although I look at it from a progressively more introspective angle, all the physical manifestations of apparent freedom still draw me in: all things flying, being somewhere unreachable, off the grid, and... driving very fast.

The quest for power, on the other hand, is something fairly new to me, and that one is definitely no wild goose chase. There is plenty of power to be had. It amazes me how easy some of it is to get: one just needs to reach out and grab it. Perhaps because this quest has very tangible rewards, it is even more addictive than the first. I find myself wanting to stretch the limits, to see how much I can get away with. I am just now starting to understand why my dad enjoyed sales and business negotiations so much. There is something thrilling about getting someone else to willingly do what you want them to do. I know some people would call us manipulators. Others, kinder, would use terms such as charmer or sweet talker. We are not malicious. We're just students of human nature, hunters looking for increasingly more challenging prey with which to play for a while. Oh, what a master hunter my father was.

***

I finally get it, the kite, the dreamy smile. It's all about freedom and power: the kite, struggling to be free, my father, striving to control it, not utterly, no, but just enough... In this delicate balance is the sweet if ephemeral relief of peaceful satisfaction.