July is the month we say goodbye to writers who are retiring or moving on to new adventures, and this is Kipp’s last post. He has been writing with us since August 2023.

“The thesis is still the river. …The thesis is still the wind.”

– Ada Limón, “Where the Circles Overlap.”

This will be my final contribution to the post calvin. As I considered what subject might be a fitting conclusion, it seemed to me that there was one prior piece that required a revisit. Exactly one year ago I wrote “On Freedom,” which sought to reclaim the titular noun from its colloquial understanding. I now realize that one of the problems with last year’s piece, at least for satisfying my own contemplation, was that its thinking rested strictly within the bounds of two contexts, namely the church and the state. These two contexts, I find, have an unfortunate and unique (though not innate) propensity to drain the vitality of most of what they come into contact with.

The relevant concerns of my previous essay were that freedom, as conceived by the church and the state, has two defining facets. First, that freedom is regularly impinged upon by responsibilities and costs, be they moral, financial, or otherwise in nature. Second, that freedom was an end in itself. That it was intrinsically good to simply have it, with little thought about how it should be participated in. The general conclusion of that essay was that freedom was best used to create and enact relationships; freedom is the ability to move unconcerned through our social scenes, extending dignity and care.

In rereading that essay, it now on the whole feels like a haphazard reach, a shaky hand barely threading needles—indeed, a topic worthy and in need of revisiting. In the intervening year, I have come to realize that the problem with freedom is not just that our institutions think of it poorly or offer me little insight into the behavior that should accompany it or that at times they actively obstruct it. Rather, it is that our common notion of freedom is quietly synonymous with full control. Mere acknowledgment of agency is equated to the practical ability to achieve what the agent chooses. Complicating or circumstantial factors are simply obstacles to overcome, and failure to overcome them is a failure of the will, the inability to accept the full measure of your freedom. If you do not feel free, if you cannot enact or acquire what you long for, it is because you are in your own way. The parameters and their promises have been legislated; you must either accommodate or overcome them.

But this is not my experience, and in fact I would suggest that it is the experience of very few people. I do not think we are collectively lacking in sufficient will or desire. It is that this fluid, quick, lethal, myriad thing we call “life” acts simultaneously for and against us. The parameters change; the promises are unkept. Whether it is your own failure or simply bad luck, you cannot say for sure. But you do your very best to continue abiding by those parameters and promises, to accept it when the outcome is disappointing, or to appreciate the way that they shift or deceive. You even look for meaning in it.

You look for meaning in the fact that for the first seventeen years of your life you were loyal—and only wanted to be seen as especially such—to the community and values of your upbringing. You look for meaning in the fact that those relationships dissipated or departed as soon as they became strained. That those values never reaped the fruit you were assured. You look for meaning in the fact that a pandemic emerged precisely in the space between your prior community and the one that you have been searching, aching for since. That your social circles continue to narrow. That you feel as though in a liminal space where your adult life has not started, the career and the family and even the friendships you were promised have not appeared. That the inner life you have developed in light of and despite these disappointments has, for all its virtues, remained insufficient, a spacewalk amongst stars while the rest of life plays out to varying degrees of fruitfulness on the earth you merely want to be a full participant in.

You look for meaning in the fact that concurrently, the brother of your closest friend committed suicide, that his parent’s marriage could not survive the fallout. That another close friend moved to a new city with their boyfriend for a possible career, all three of which, it turned out, did not love them. That all the things you were forced to learn at seventeen about the church you grew up in have now come to light in a series of public scandals and shattering wounds to the people you used to love most. You look for meaning in the fact that you could continue the list of anecdotes, with each of them becoming closer and graver, but that not even the vague gesture of the second person provides appropriate protection against naming some of them. That all you can say is that the years have been hard, and long, and little has gone the way you wanted or expected—nor has it gone the way you expected it not to go the way you wanted or expected it.

Frankly, the extent to which I have or do not have freedom in such a world, having had such a life seems like a poor use of my attention. The feeling of being free—at least the feeling I used to recognize as freedom, unqualified control—is one I now know to be fleeting, its sheen never brighter than the sharpness of the world that cuts back. That is always cutting back, though perhaps with equal parts belligerence and surgical precision. The closest thing I have to that notion of freedom looks more like detachment—once again, spacewalking.

It is December of 2024. I have ascended four flights of stairs to a windowless, gray-walled rectangle whose decor is expressing an identity crisis that involves a conference room, a classroom, and a bunker (my life is expressing the same crisis). The lights are dim in the far half of the space, a sparse powerpoint presentation haloing the edges of my classmates’ bodies (a holiness I can still see and feel), it is casting bright variations on the glassy surface of the table. I am sitting where I normally do, two seats down from the podium (trying to find a similar holiness in the diffusion of my shadow on that surface). In an unusually personal final lecture that at once meets and furthers what I feel I have been seeking for years, my professor offers a single phrase that emerges among the sweep of what can only be called a series of revelations: “Maneuverability is the key to your freedom.”

Not the ability to control or maximize the outcomes of your actions. Not fulfilling your obligations, such that you earn the right to use the remaining space. Not clinging to coherent sets of values and their promises—none of which they can really keep. Not unobstructing relationships that provide infinite permission to behave as you please. Not striking your desires over and over with the hammer-blow of willpower. No; just movement. Just transition. Just the grace by which a river shifts around and between rocks, through its bends. Just the gentle strength by which the wind shakes the branches of trees. Just the elegance and poise by which those very branches let themselves be pushed away, and then drift back. As they do, a few leaves drop to the pavement and lightly scrape across it in a dwindling breeze. They catch against your feet, which you lift, letting them continue on. The breeze becomes wind again, and you watch them, no longer scraping, but rising now, flying in slow and sweeping circles towards a horizon tinged in sun and cloud and a shade of blue that can only be described as the most ordinary variety—which is to say, it can only be described as kind. Those leaves become less and less visible, and you would swear—if you didn’t know otherwise—they might just be birds up there, in that blue, birds soaring and flocked and heading to some unknown but commensurate roost.

“I am learning to live inside fewer words. I do more drawings now than letters, though they seem still to go hand with glove. The birds have returned again this year. A bright one taps constantly at my window in the early hours, calling me to earn my name and join the flock!”

– Evelyn Byrd, from “The Lost Letter-Box of Evelyn Byrd.”

Kipp De Man

Kipp De Man graduated from Calvin University in 2023, having majored in film and media studies. He is currently working towards a master’s degree in the same discipline at Washington University in St. Louis. He enjoys reading and writing poetry, rock climbing, and Coke Zero.