End of the Leash
Ministerial Meandering
End of the leash
I have wondered, from time to time, what it would be like to be totally ‘off-leash’ - free as a bird, no constraints whatsoever. Perhaps you have too. What would total freedom look like - or feel like?
It doesn’t take the brains of an archbishop (apologies to our own John Stephens) to realize that no such thing as total freedom exists for us as human beings. I was going to preface that statement with ‘a priori’, until I realized that it meant ‘something assumed without the need for evidence’. Of course, some people have acted as though they already had total freedom, and the wiser of them will now accept my statement ‘a posteriori’ - i.e. ‘knowledge based on experience or evidence’.
Physiology is the problem; along with anatomy and pathology. These three lethal musketeers truly adhere to their pledge of ‘All for one, and one for all’. No amount of money in the world - or power, come to that - will stop our bodies ageing and our ability for ‘free-running’, or running free. Even Elsa, the ‘Born Free’ lion cub adopted by George and Joy Adamson, was finally constrained by ‘time’s wingèd chariot’ at the early age of five.
What do I mean by ‘the end of the leash’? It is not - as you might think - the end of your life, but the constraint we unconsciously put upon our own freedom. There is nothing so terrifying as absolute freedom, because we all need boundaries. In our adolescence and early adult lives, we might not agree with this, but what we are doing then is actually testing those boundaries. How far can we go with our disobedience and challenges of authority? How far can we push our bodies before something breaks?
Knowing our limits is not the same as knowing our limitations; for me, our limits are dictated by circumstances and the rules of physics, anatomy, and physiology. Our limitations are determined by how far we are prepared to take our limits. Let’s take an example; suppose we have trained ourselves to breath-hold for 5 minutes, and to be able to swim in freezing cold water. Then we take ourselves up to a frozen lake or a piece of the frozen arctic, cut a hole in the ice, walk for - say - 100 metres, and cut a second hole. Then we try and swim from one hole to the other under the ice without dying.
The limits on this exercise are the distance between the holes, the functional reserve of your lungs, and the speed with which your core body temperature will drop in freezing water. The limitations are set by how well you have trained your body to withstand these huge physiological insults. One might argue that to be able to attempt this demonstrates a freedom from what is regarded as ‘normal’. We could agree here, and also that to do so would not include us in the category of ‘normal’ anyway. We would, however, be going to the end of our physiological leash.
The Elon Musk brigade of super-rich find that the world is not enough, and so are pushing the boundaries of space, to see if it would be possible to colonize Mars. But note - even space has boundaries. Einstein said that the only thing we have that has no barriers is our imagination - and that is where, I would say, we truly have no leash.
By the way, the longest under-ice breath-hold swim ever recorded (so far) with no fins and no wetsuit was 105 meters in 2 minutes 27 seconds by Arthur Guérin-Boëri at Morrison’s Quarry, Quebec, Canada (water temp 0.7°C), in March, 2022. Anyone want to take him on?
Philip+