Staying real!

A most interesting conversation today about happiness, brainwashing, how life works and several other things.

I have to say that my most important value is personal freedom, the capacity to do what I like when I like. I'm not claiming this is for everyone, but it seems to be incredibly important to me. I am not sure about the term happiness, it seems to have got mixed up somewhere along the line with "pleasure" if i had to use one word to describe what happiness means to me it would be "real"

So when it's real, sometimes it's pleasureable, sometimes it's painful, somtimes it's a bit mad, sometimes it's really quiet and reflective. I simply can't wrap my head around being happy all the time, it makes no sense to me.

There are many sources of bliss out there, the frontal lobotomy, heroin, religion, alcohol, hypnosis, 12 step recovery programmes, but feck it to me they all seem to be artificial, they all seem to be a cheating way of getting your highs by avoiding any lows life has to chuck at us.

In my life i am lucky to get lots of highs, but i know the other side has to exist too, that if there are highs there has to be lows, if we get the freedom to make choices, we will always know doubt, if we hand over the choices to someone else, we will have lost our freedom.

The reality for me is that life is about choices and chance, that we have the freedom to make our own choices, that life cannot be a straight happy line (and christ do we try to medicate it to make it so, with prozac and lithium and god knows what else)

It won't always be happy, but it will always be real, and that's happiness enough for me.