Freedom From Fear

"Fear controls everything." Says Gemmy.

He is in the kitchen, busily filling the myriad of bowls that will give his various housemates their breakfast. 

"Everybody is always afraid," he continues, pouring dog food into a bowl. The puppies, pressed up against the fence that keeps them out of the kitchen, salivate. "Afraid of being alone, afraid of growing old, afraid that they will not have enough money, afraid of what other people will think. Fear. Always fear."

He finishes with one bowl and moves onto the next, expertly. "It is how the corporations control you. You have to stay, have to accept the conditions on employment because although you can leave they know you will not because you are scared to leave. In case you become poor. Or in case you cannot find another job."

"It's not just your employers," I venture, thinking again about those rows of 'whitening' products lined up on the shelves everywhere we have been. Everywhere that people do not have naturally white skin, "it's the advertisers as well. Making you afraid to be ugly."

"Yes!" Agrees Gemmy fervently, I'd a clamour of noise as he hands the dogs four filled bowls, "because then you will be alone and you are scared of that. And you think you need all this money to help you avoid all these things you have been taught to be afraid of."

He is right. I like to think of myself as fairly free thinking, as being quite in materialistic, but I want to come home looking brown and healthy so I can be attractive and so people at work or in any of the other various circles I might move in can see that travelling was the right thing. I don't want them to think I was wasting my time here. I am afraid of not being liked. I go to great efforts to be liked. And I want to earn enough money to allow me to make more choices like this. I want to buy myself my freedom. Along with some make up to avoid ugliness, healthy food to avoid obesity or aging, presents for the people I love because I am afraid they might not know that I love them...

"It took me two years to get free" says Gemmy. He reaches down to move Christopher the kitten away from the big cat food and a rather snarling Lada, and towards his own kitten food. In the end, as we all know, he will eat both anyway.

Gemmy worked in the city for a big company, in the same office as his partner. When the relationship ended, he took it as his cue to male a more general break. But, as Gemmy comments, "you can't just walk out." 

You really can't. I noted the exact same thing when M and I were preparing to leave. All those films and books and general imaginings about just romantically tossing a few things into a bag and getting on the next plane to anywhere, are the reason nobody thinks they could be 'brave enough' to travel. Oddly enough, if you reported more openly the difficulty in doing so, the organisation and work involved, it seems somehow more possible. Not many people are really that reckless.

Gemmy spent two years in the same office with his ex, just going through the various motions to set himself up for an exit. He needed to sort out the house they shared, get his finances in order, save a bit, plan a bit, and then, and only then, exit stage left. To help him save he took a part time job in addition to his full time one, as a receptionist in a spa. When there was a course for new masseurs, he asked, just out of interest, if he could join. He tried it out, had natural talent and, by now, a passion for it, and eventually got himself a job as a spa manager.

He moved to Langkawi, and fell in love with it. He worked in a spa on the tourist beaches.

"You'll be back" his friends said.

"Come back to that nice lucrative office job" pleaded his mother.

Gemmy opened his own spa. He lived simply and happily and, for the first time, really enjoyed his work. 

And that, I would say, if I was writing a nice neatly tied up story of  escape from the rat race, is history.

But it's not. The best stories, the most permanent escapes are not that easy.

The spa business struggled and stalled.

"Surely now," his friends said, "you will have to come back to the city. Poor you. I guess it just didn't work out."

Gemmy had a stool, a hat and a towel, the first two of which still remain in his kitchen. He took them out onto the Langkawi beaches - and he gave foot massages to the tourists.

Of course, with genuine talent, enthusiasm and staying power, you can make anything work. He grew notorious for all the right reasons, until all the rich and privileged were hiring him, even over the lavish spa facilities provided in their posh hotels.

And so, eventually Gemmy found this land, out in the middle of the jungle, bought it cheap and made it what it is now. That was a long time ago.

And now you really can say that the rest is history.

"This place," says Gemmy, his wave of the hand somehow encompassing the  building, the trees, the monkeys, the natural fresh water stream and the birds, "is my dream. I am living the dream!" He grins from ear to ear. And he is. He really is.

"But to get away from that mindset," he says, growing solemn again, "to get away from all that fear. It was hard. It was really hard work."

We are entangled in complicated webs of fear, some created by society, some of our own making. Whether the various forces of government, advertising, and corporations have evilly conjured this fear out of nowhere, as part of a conspiracy to control us, or whether they play on something we imagine into being ourselves I am not sure. Either way it grows up and tangles itself into barbed cages which can smother us quietly, if we let them, without us even noticing.

I wonder how culturally placed this fearfulness is. Certainly it takes a different form in different cultures. Fear of being 'fat' in one country became fear of being 'thin' in another. The urge to be tanned becomes the urge to be white. The need to own a house becomes the need to be seen as loyal to your business. To be old is to be revered in one place, to be brushed off and laughed at in another.

I remember B telling me that cats often move their kittens around to avoid predators tracking them through their scent. Imagine if we had to do that as humans. But maybe we do. How better to teach your child to avoid the predators of peer pressure, body image, greed but to show them how very arbitrary their culturally ascribed goal posts really are?

But Gemmy is right. It is hard to free yourself. However free minded we might grow through meeting people like Gemmy, how long will it take before our own culturally defined expectations and fears catch up with us again?