How free must you be to be truly free?
How alive must you be to truly be living?
There is no measure, no yardstick. The only judge is yourself. But are you alive? Truly alive?
Ha, look at me -- judging those that can not be.
We are all living on a gradient. A gradient of alignment with our self. Who we think we are compared to who we truly are. The child wanders freely through life as himself, it is only the adult mind that has learned to act a certain way.
Learning is wonderful : developing skills, acquiring new capacity ... but when we learn to be less of ourselves? To hide ourselves for fear of persecution and judgement. This is a skill we can all afford to forget.