The most valuable lesson I have ever come to know is that there so much I’ve yet to learn.

It is within the seeking to learn, that we come to understand. It is within the understanding, that our vision and our minds expand. It is within the expansion of the mind for which we become free.

Within freedom of the mind, we taste a multi-dimensional experience of empathetic reality. 

How do we become free?

• Ask all of the questions, and position them to the right audience, mindfully and respectfully
• Travel and dwell within all of the places you have feared venturing toward
• Think of things that intimidate you, do them anyway
• Lean into experiences that terrify you
• Engage a social circle outside of your norm
• Share dialogue and laughter with a strange stranger, until they become a familiar stranger
• Consider re-forming an opinion of a person you’ve developed an opionion of long ago
• Read books and study philosophy, psychology, theology, anthropology, religion, or anything else you want to learn
• Challenge thoughts including what you hear or learn, what other people think, and especially what you think
• Fall and fail, hard. Do not forsake what you have failed; it has not forsaken you for failing it.

Reading through this list reminds me of a long-loved Anne Frank quote, 

And finally I twist my heart round again, so that the bad is on the outside and the good is on the inside, and keep on trying to find a way of becoming what I would so like to be, and could be, if there weren’t any other people living in the world.

Perhaps, in her seeking of freedom, Anne sought to understand, so mindfully, with such pure intention.

Anna Badrieh