Roskilde

Tomorrow I am going to be leaving for Denmark to attend the infamous Roskilde Festival with my friends Anton Michalski, Julie Hauge and Christoffer Eriksson to be joined later by Marcus Pernow.  The plan is to first stay in a hostel for two nights to see Copenhagen and only on Sunday join the fellow festival goers in Roskilde.  It will be quite the experience as I have never been to a festival, let alone one that lasts 8 days! There will be a lot of beer and bad food but that's all part of the experience.  In fact, I will be celebrating my 18th birthday amidst the 60,000 people collected at the Orange stage listening to the likes of Queen of the Stone Age and Kraftwerk. It will be amazing and I am really excited.

The Idea of Community and Belonging

I am currently in Mainz-Finthen Germany to visit family, but even more importantly, to celebrate my mother's 50th birthday.  Finthen is a village of approximately 14,000 people, a few km away from the provincial capital, Mainz.  On a bike excursion  with my grandfather today, I would realize just how provincial my ancestral homeland truly is. As we went along our usual route, my grandfather decided to  take a different path home and turned into a gated trailer park. Previously I had only biked passed the place and understood it as a vacation destination because of the lakes that the trailers are settled around.  However, I was astonished to find that these were in fact permanent homes that gave the impression of such overt distance to the outside world that I came to realize just how absurdly contrasted lives even in the western world can be.

For the first time I saw flagpoles waving the German flag shamelessly. Flags are virtually nonexistent in the area where my granparents live.  German society is still largely unprepared to demonstrate their nationality openly.  Nevertheless, a sense of belonging in such a community seems to be the guiding purpose of its existence that fills a spiritual gap that their economic position may not fill. Nonetheless, perhaps even more vital to such a community than nationality, was the unquestionable allegiance to football clubs. Waving underneath, and on rare occasion even above the German flag, the banner of the household's team flew proudly.

I am evaluating an entire community simply from the brief encounter upon a bicycle and therefore all I say are mere presumptions. Yet despite my observations and the apparent economic condition, the atmosphere of the community felt content. It was clean, there was no evidence of graffiti or other vandalism, and on first glance the people seemed happy.  Perhaps this is because, above any other belonging, lies that for the community.  The community supports itself. I feel that people who live in such a secluded cove can find a much greater sense of contentment than anyone living in a city. The pace of life is slow and the people are friendly.  It is in fact reminiscent of a tribal society. They are of a greater clan (Germany), but their loyalty is always to their family and community. I feel that in such a society, cases of depression are far lower because the elements that create depression do not exist.  Some of the people living there might not even do so because of economic reasons but perhaps even spiritual reasons because they simply cannot follow with the world outside the trailer park gates. 

Freedom

"Most people do not really want freedom, because freedom involves responsibility, and most people are frightened of responsibility"

-Sigmund Freud

With these words in mind I would like to discuss a few things about freedom and the potential conflicts I might have with my own long awaited liberation during my Gap Year.  In the grand scheme of things I will inevitably have to move away from my parents and become responsible over myself if I wish to live normally.   In my gap year and the ensuing years in university, I will largely live independent from my parents, and yet, I will still remain largely dependent on them financially until I find secure income.   In terms of financial freedom, 18 is hardly an age to look forward to.  But is that not a good thing, if we actually don't want to have responsibility as Freud states?  

I find any freedom from outside sources to be a profound check of self determination and liberty. Yet with each freedom I gain it seems another link is attached to my chain, but it is a chain that is attached to my own post and not that of my parents or anybody else.  Freedom means buying my own food, cooking for myself, washing my clothes, cleaning the house and getting to places on my own. When one puts freedom into context it become decreasingly appetizing.

However, what I find my largest challenge will be in freedom, will be to prevent myself from wasting away in a state of procrastinating stasis.  My gap year cannot be an extended holiday.  If it does, I will lose all interest  and passion for activity I might have had to begin with.  Sleeping into the late morning and doing virtually nothing can only be satisfying for a short period of time until it becomes a trap for the apathetic.  

In my gap year, I hope to always keep busy with something so that I never really have nothing on my mind - because in that case I know I have lost. I can keep busy through writing blog posts, reading, biking, joining sport teams and many other things but certainly not putting countless hours into mindless internet dawdling.