The oldest childhood dream I can remember is wanting to be like my father. His warmth, confidence, determination and strength were attractive to me as a child.
When I was growing up my father was the biggest influence in my life. He played a big part in shaping my personality, my path and my ethics. When I was a child my father was living out the life that he had created through his own interpretation and definition of freedom.
He took an active part in shaping his life and came up from poverty to fulfilling his definition of the American dream. Being an immigrant with nothing to his name but the help of some family and friends he used hard work and determination to raise a family with stability and comfort.
My father had to endure a hardship at a young age.
When my father was a child his father, my grandfather, was murdered outside his own home. Spending his teen years and young adult years without a father figure must have been challenging to say the least.
Defining his own masculinity would be borrowed from memories of his father, other influences and roles in his life. In his family raising a son would present its own challenges of embracing and defining his masculinity.
Pressures from work, providing for a family and all of other life challenges put a burden on my father's shoulders. Without always having a positive outlet for his stress the tension was often aimed at those around him. At times I took it personally and internally.
As a youth and young adult I often swore that I would never be like my parents when I grew up, at least not in the ways that I considered negative. But hindsight is 20-20 and I followed right along a parallel path in a different guise.
In fact once I finally got past all my rebelliousness phases and began maturing into the man I am now, I began embracing all that I have in common with my parents.
Still I did not embrace the negative attributes that I had borrowed from my father which include repressing my negative emotions. In my early thirties all those bottled up emotions began catching up with me and cried out to be resolved.
As challenging as they are, coincidentally they also represent my good fortune.
Starting from a young age my father was passionate about his personal spiritual path. Despite all the hardships and emotional challenges he faced along the way he kept with his spiritual practice.
At some point in his 50s or 60s things really started clicking for him. He upped his spiritual devotion, practiced yoga, revised his diet, spent more time in the garden. All of these gave him a greater sense of peace and belonging. His own personal mantra centers around love which he shares openly with family.
His own efforts at improving himself are I am sure far from over, but he has certainly surpassed my expectations of what he could accomplish. He set a beautiful example for me that there is no age where positive change is not possible. When overcoming his hardships had once been awkward and painful he is now showing an amazing amount of grace.
My father has once again become a major role model in my life. And in finding my own path I have borrowed some of his philosophies, including love.
How do I express my freedom? I express my freedom with love.
When I am free I am able to love openly, completely. When I am not free I am subject to fear, greed, anger or other emotions that hold me back from peace and serenity.
Love gives me freedom and being free allows me to love. When I had this realization I knew that I would strive for love in my life.
I am human and I am subject to those emotions of fear, greed and anger. In some contexts it's easier to live in those emotions because they give me comfort.
Love gives me an alternative and a fallback.
The more I am able to live in a place of love, the more comfort love can give me in new contexts. And it becomes easier to get back to a place of love.
I have appreciation for my father for giving me the gift of seeing that it is possible to overcome emotional challenges with hard work and determination and for sharing his own experience in finding a place of love and peace.
I have appreciation to all of those in my life who have shown me love.
I have appreciation for those from which I came, my mother, father, my sisters who have given me so much love.
I have appreciation for @idyllwild for choosing love in her own life and sharing that love with me so that we may both experience love more fully.
Freedom is relative to the individual.
In my case freedom is relative to the very moment. When I am expressing love, you can be sure I am free in that moment. In those other moments... I am working on finding my way back to love, working on finding my way back to freedom, however long that may take.
This is my entry for #DreamsComeTrue thanks to @senorcoconut's Challenge Let's Make Dreams Come True
This is also my unofficial response to Freedom Challenge #3: How do you express your freedom?, filed under #FreedomChallenge.