Freedom

In the States I had a few classes of American history. In one of these classes we tried to untangle the discourse of freedom. We trudged through centuries of American history, pages upon pages, and observed the manipulation and transformation of the concept of freedom. In the end I knew that freedom is something that has been defined and redefined over and over again, but its exact shape remained elusive.

Of all the places, I had to travel all to way to Germany to have a fleeting idea of what freedom means. I might have cracked The Pursuit of Happiness as well. The Germans call it Fahrrad. In English, this intellectual concept translates roughly into bicycle. And I speak of no conceptual bicycle, I really mean a regular bike. You know, with gears, brakes, pedals and a handlebar. The simple mechanical wonder.

As with many important aspects of life, I didn’t realize what freedom was until I lost it. Until this week, I have been able to borrow a bicycle from the hotel and make trips in the stunning German landscapes on stunning German bicycle paths, where the journey definitely is as important as the destination. This week I was suddenly told that I couldn’t get a bike on my day off. That it is the high season and that the bikes are for the guests, who pay money for them. I returned in the afternoon, but there still wasn’t a single bike for me. I tried the following day, to no avail. Except this time, instead of stiff politeness, I was regarded with irritation, like I was a fly that got in and made it hard for the employees to concentrate on their work. Maybe I’d land on a guest’s piece of cake too.

At the time, they, like me, probably didn’t realize that getting a bicycle on my day off means a lot to me. The difference is that I grasped this fact as soon as I was swatted off three times in a row, while they still didn’t realize. They had just taken my freedom away. Instead of writing the UN and informing them that my basic human rights had be disregarded and junked, I managed to get a bike for the day from the sister hotel.

Oh the smile on my breeze-caressed face when I rode down the road in the middle of fields of not-quite-gold-yet.