Recently I watched a video of Jonathan Franzen discussing his novel Freedom on The Oprah Winfrey Show. Oprah’s first question related to the title, and his answer had to do with all the ways in which we are not free. His words caused me to reflect on my own definitions of freedom. I ran long distance for many years. Through child rearing, tenure, and promotion that hour or so on the road was freedom to me, a state of mind but also the luxury of solitude in an otherwise frantic life. In the years since, I’ve begun to wonder if my running was more about running away than anything else. When my sisters and I argued, I ran. When my colleagues and I disagreed, I ran. When my spouse and I had disputes, I ran. It may have been running away when I left teaching. Running away equaled flight and seemed to equal freedom. A privileged view to be sure, it ignored the ways in which oppression – physical, mental, economic and the like – kept people in chains, at least metaphorically. It also failed to consider the delusion of freedom associated with progress. When we fail to realize all the ways in which we are not free, we have exonerated those who promote the illusion of freedom in everyday life, inhibiting freedom while simultaneously suggesting its possibility. In my novel WHO CAN KNOW THE HEART characters ran away before I could stop them. Freedom, in the spirit of flight or the not yet, took many forms. Sometimes it was in the mind, as when solitude felt important and anonymity even more so. Sometimes it was to have a different life. And sometimes it was when there was nothing left to do. But running away was never the same as being free. For the “border is constantly with us” as Milan Kundera’s narrator says about the Czech border in The Book of Laughter and Forgetting because recognizing the illusion of freedoms, like religious and intellectual, and realizing what keeps us imprisoned, such as the desire to fill a gap, may be a condition of the heart.