Kinda depends on what you believe in.
If you believe in God… HIS WORD sets the precedence.
If you believe in everything coming from… THE PRIMORDIAL OOZE… then you set your own precedence… at your own peril.
If you believe in the LAW… then you lean on the first found judgement of similar cases.
What precedence is there, where I think, “I can change my life”?
Turns out… nobody cares… so I find myself coming full circle… in my past I had a joke. It concerned my last name. Being of Spanish descent… BOSQUEZ… [looks cool on a baseball jersey] when asked what it meant, I would reply, “Bosquez is Spanish for, ‘I do what I want’.”
Just a little joke there. The name ‘bosquez’ seems to originate from the central Pyrenees mountains… ‘bosque’ meaning brush, woods with water, and ‘ez’ from Spanish for ‘son of’… so I like to consider myself Basque on some level, and a “son of the forest” for sure. Using Ancestry.com and some other sites helped me with the “real” name definition.
It took awhile to find “where it originated”.
Where does the precedence, or idea, of being free… come from?
Free to choose.
Free to try.
Free to… NOT try.
Free to rise.
Free to wallow.
And I had this thought… “If being free is a personal right, a truth that is self evident, then I have a responsibility to that right, and if I have a responsibility then it behooves me to prepare myself to maintain that freedom.
But… there does seem to be a scale involved… say a scale from 1 to 10.
At the start of the scale I can choose to exert the energy to maintain a level 1 of freedom, you know, just knowing I’m free is good enough!
And on the other end, being a 10… if you live in the United States of America, you can recite the Declaration of Independence, fly Old Glory daily, have your NRA lifetime membership… and… you know John Wayne’s birth date!
[Sunday, he was born on a Sunday]
So the only thing that I see holding me back from doing anything is… me.
I have learned that I am free to choose my actions, but I am not free to choose the consequences of those actions.
I have learned that, overall, Gods Word does provide a “true North” direction for a person to have some information to make those initial actions.
His Word says He chose… when I would be, and… where I would be…
“From one man he made every nation of men, that they should inhabit the whole earth; and he determined the times set for them and the exact places where they should live… ” ~ Acts 17
And in other places He says, “Do not be discouraged…”
I’m at a funny place. I am far enough away from my last job now where that experience and knowledge is moot, and at my new job, I’m still kinda a rookie.
I also find myself in a position, concerning my writing, that even though I’ve been writing since 2016, I am really just getting going, learning every day, a true novice in the industry.
But… I did choose both paths.
Both with getting… a new job… and taking on the project of re-branding myself from unskilled labor to author.
I don’t know if my “new-self” is quite “self-evident” just yet.
It’s fun trying though!
I added a couple of the pieces of research I’m using to try and understand my personal freedoms, I hope they spark a thought or two for you, as I use them to find what “precedence” is there for me, to be me.
The Founding Fathers…
“At the most general level, they created the first modern nation-state based on liberal principles. These include the democratic principle that political sovereignty in any government resides in the citizenry rather than in a divinely sanctioned monarchy; the capitalistic principle that economic productivity depends upon the release of individual energies in the marketplace rather than on state-sponsored policies; the moral principle that the individual, not the society or the state, is the sovereign unit in the political equation; and the judicial principle that all citizens are equal before the law. Moreover, this liberal formula has become the preferred political recipe for success in the modern world, vanquishing the European monarchies in the 19th century and the totalitarian regimes of Germany, Japan, and the Soviet Union in the 20th century.” ~ https://www.britannica.com/topic/Founding-Fathers/The-achievement
“6. The charters granted to practically autonomous states of
Northern Spain and Southern France. In France these
states were Labourd, La Soule and BWarn; in Spain, the
so-called “exempt provinces” of the Basques and Navarre.
It is the fueros of the Basques that have played the largest
part in history as charters of liberty; and they, together
with the fueros of Aragon, have the greatest interest for
students.” ~ https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/2139647.pdf
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