“Forget the former things; do not dwell on the past. See, I am doing a new thing! Now it springs up; do you not perceive it? I am making a way in the wilderness and streams in the wasteland”. Isaiah 43:18-19

My daughter asked me over Christmas what I thought freedom meant. Such a complex question, I thought, particularly for a teenager who sits so actively within the world of social media, where sometimes the pressure to conform means that she finds it hard to navigate what really makes her feel free.

The twelve days of Christmas are one of the few shared pauses that leave an agreed loosening of the week. You wake and, for a moment, don’t quite know what day it is. The usual edges soften. There’s permission to be slightly out of step with the calendar. Even when work continues, it does so with a lighter hand, as if someone has eased a foot off the metaphorical gas pedal. In an information-fuelled age, stepping out of the current for a few days can feel like a small, private rebellion.

At Charnwood over that period, we became attentive to the small moments that arrive as the temperature drops. There is a particular satisfaction to coming in from a long walk, the cold still in your cheeks, and sitting down by the fire. It is not as a performance of cosiness, but something practical and steady: warmth returning to your hands, the room slowly catching up with you. Sometimes the best part is simply watching the flames. Noticing how they change, how they settle. It’s astonishing, really, how quickly the mind wants to be elsewhere, running ahead, forecasting, rehearsing, when what you need is directly in front of you.

A friend said the other day that, historically speaking, we are living in a kind of golden age: knowledge at our fingertips, an easier, more cushioned life than our forebears. We didn’t stay on the subject for long, but it stuck with me. Whatever the inequalities of access, information now feels less bound to one class, one place, one gatekeeper. Open your phone and there is a chorus: a mixed range of voices, sometimes wise, sometimes loud, often both. There is real joy in it too — the encyclopedia in the pocket, the ability to learn almost anything in the space of a few minutes.

And yet the same flood can leave us feeling oddly unfree. Not because we lack options, but because our attention is constantly being claimed. Minute by minute, ping by ping, the day is nudged and subdivided until it becomes hard to sit inside a moment without also feeling the pressure of the next one.

People who remember life before phones talk about ordinary pauses: waiting in a post office queue, making brief eye contact, looking out of a window, allowing the mind to go slack for a minute. Those small stretches of time weren’t filled with the sense that something else was demanding to be answered. In that microscopic space — standing still, with nowhere to be except exactly where you are — I think freedom sometimes lives. Not in grand gestures, but in the simple fact of being uninterrupted long enough to daydream.

If that’s true, then freedom has something to do with how our days are defined: by urgency, by schedules, by the quiet insistence that we should be doing something else. Those definitions can be useful, of course. But they can also press down on the part of us that notices, wanders, makes connections, the part that is, in its own way, creative. And perhaps creativity, however modest, is a key to feeling free.

In early December the nights were full of a bright supermoon, nearer to the earth, startling in its scale. The moon is always wondrous, but that week it seemed almost theatrical, as if someone had turned up the light. I wondered what it would mean to live by that kind of marker again: not the clock’s strict measurements, but a rhythm that belongs to the world. The moon is bound to the tides, and more quietly to our own moods and drift. It offers a different kind of order: not a demand, but a pattern.

So perhaps freedom in 2026 isn’t something to chase so much as something to notice. A little less availability. A little more attention.

And when I need reminding, I know where to look. Sometimes it’s the night sky. Sometimes it’s simply sitting a few minutes longer than necessary, watching the flames shift and settle behind the stove glass, until the day stops insisting. When I go back to discuss what freedom means for my daughter, she says it’s just being allowed to daydream, without the question, “what are you doing now?”