Driving all the time I miss out on a lot of things. Not because I fail to pay attention. For me driving is reflexive. Following directions is second nature. Autopilot, the sense of where I am going, takes over and I don’t think – I just go. Take this morning for example. I took a left turn without thinking about it.

It sounds like nothing. It is nothing.

Almost. But today is a dear friend’s birthday and Juneteenth, and I keep coming back to one uncomfortable question: what freedoms am I living inside right now that I treat like that left turn?

So now I’m thinking about the people in Galveston, 1865. That was when they celebrated the day they that they found out. That’s when General Order No. 3 was read aloud in Texas, with 2,000 Federal troops at the ready. 

Not the day it became legally true — that was two years earlier!

They celebrated the day someone showed up and said the words out loud. Freedom arrived, like a surprise birthday with confetti, balloons, and cake. 

And for the first time ever in Texas, they treated it like that. 

I don’t treat my freedom like a surprise. It’s more like the weather. Or oxygen. Simply breathing it, taking it for granted. Like a left turn I’ve made a thousand times.

There’s something worth noticing.

It’s not guilt I’m talking about. Guilt is a dead end — it makes everything about you and your feelings. Instead, it should be about the thing you’re supposed to notice. I’m talking about something closer to attention. The discipline of looking at your ordinary Friday and asking: what is present here that someone else once fought to make possible?

Your drive to work. Your job that you chose. A church you do, or refuse to attend. An opinion you vocalize. Or a place you can stand inside without being watched because you might steal something.

These aren’t small things dressed up as small things. They are large things. And we have been made comfortable. And comfortable is good. The goal is always for freedom to feel ordinary. That’s what winning looks like. But ordinary has a shadowy side, and we don’t want to see it, so we stop looking. 

Juneteenth is an interruption. That’s what I think it’s for. Not just a celebration — though it absolutely is that, and the celebration matters deeply — but also a yearly tap on the shoulder. Hey. Remember this? Remember that someone made a long ride to Galveston so a crowd of people could find out what was already true?

Major General Gordon Granger showed up in Galveston, Texas. He spoke, albeit briefly, and made freedom real by making it known.

Today, you are living inside what he, and 2,000 troops, rode toward.

Pay attention to it today. Not with guilt, not with a speech, not with a post that performs the feeling instead of having it. Just notice. Take the left turn and know what it cost. Walk through the open door. And remember. It wasn’t always open to everyone.

But it is now. 

Then go live like someone who knows, instead of someone who forgets what that left turn looks like.