. ...coming back from india has made me realise that there are two sorts of freedom - the freedom TO do things and the freedom FROM things being done to you. in India I was astonished at how free I felt - free to ride a motorbike without a helmet, sit down in the road, buy valium from the corner shop, dress like a fool if I wanted, not wash, play a guitar in the middle of a city street, buy charras on the beach - and it felt like it was my personal responsibility to protect myself against the things that other people might do to me. i met a very idiosyncratic dutch biker and we disccussed the differences between riding in india and europe and he said that he preferred india - where there is a sort of brutal, darwinian chaos on the roads and where a moment's lapse in mindfulness is highly likely to end in your death - because in europe the roads are so over-designed, the traffic lighting systems so perfectly timed, the roads so clearly marked and the etiquette so precise that it is possible to drive for hours without ever really paying more than 40% attention to what you are doing. The implication is that in europe, where we hand our trust and our safety over to the state, like children assuming their parents will warn them if it is not safe to cross the road, we are in fact far more vulnerable as day by day we incrementally lose our alertness and our vigilance. Apparently free from danger, actually bloated and sluggish and easily frightened - entirely reliant on the kindness of strangers for our safety and unable to risk ourselves in many of the ways that would teach us to be more mindful... oh yes, the bitter taste of my return has still not passed... :0) .