freedom and choice

My friend David wrote and said, “I think your career path is bad ass,” which is really the best thing I could hear.
I want to talk about choice and happiness, especially in the case of writers, poets and other artists.
I am twenty-six now and this is the age when I look around and many of the friends I had in college have settled down a wife or a husband, a starter home or an apartment, the Jeep Cherokee or the Landrover and would eventually like to get a dog though the landlord won’t allow for it. People’s lives are beginning to settle into some form of security, the first baby is on the way and this is the life that I am told is said to breed happiness. And it does. I do not critique the life, or if I do critique it, to critique is not to condemn. Only when the young artists is surrounded by such lives she or he has to ask questions, is forced to reshape everything we were taught to value.
The most that most people can hope for is a happy family and a steady job, enough money. Security. Insofar as people gain this they are happy. If my interests are safe, secure and well kept then I am happy. Now again there comes a shadow across my mind that may suggest otherwise, but such shadows are easily banished by flicking a light on or turning the T.V’s volume up.
But to a very real extent such happiness is not possible for an artists regardless is she forsakes marriage and a secure job or if he possesses both. In the end to the poet all things are his interests, his family, poetry is his job. And all is not well, there is no security, in writing there is no instant gratification and no assurance of pay. Even a gas station attendant knows that he’s doing his job and earning his bread. If you work in a clothing store, when you ring up the sales price and pass the bag over the counter you know you’ve done your job. If you write it may be thirty years before someone writes a letter and lets you know you have changed their life. And then you must wonder if it has all been worth it. There is really no set price on what the writing life should pay. And I don’t mean monetarily. How many lives should you touch? How often? How do you know when you’ve done what you were supposed to? To a very real extent accepting the writing life is jumping into the dark, and the contentment your friends and family may seem to find so easily you know you will have to look for in other places. Or maybe you will have to forsake contentment and happiness altogether in search of something better?
Surely there is something better than pleasure. Surely security is a fickle god, and there are other gods worthier of our services?