The quote also implies that freedom can persist even when external freedom is limited. If commitments are unavoidable—debts, duties, difficult seasons—then the remaining question is whether one can still choose one’s orientation: priorities, boundaries, and meaning.
Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning (1946) famously argues that even in extreme captivity, a person retains “the last of the human freedoms” to choose one’s attitude. Coelho’s message harmonizes with this: the essence of freedom is not a perfectly open calendar, but a mind and heart capable of selecting the most life-giving path available. [...]
