Geoff Thompson: Writer – Teacher – Martial artist

During a difficult period some years ago I walked around Coombe abbey with my old friend Tony Somers and we talked. It was a good time for me because I was very depressed, and although I was suffering I knew that the depression was purifying (all the depressed parts of me were leaving), even in the middle of that dark night when all I wanted to do was escape, I knew that my experience was ultimately great, one might even say fantastic.

Why was it so fantastic?

Because even though I was walking, talking and sleeping in a thick fog of melancholy I knew what I wanted. I knew exactly and precisely what was missing from my life.
Freedom.

I wanted freedom and I intended to get it, at what ever the cost.

When I told Tony that I wanted to be free my certainty was as hard as diamond.

Up until that time I had lead a colourful life, but I had not experienced the free will I craved. And the reason my depression was so fantastic is because I innately knew that my escape lay in the very belly of the feelings that were shoving me around like a playground bully (see The Beginners Guide to Darkness). I wanted to be free, even though I was afraid of being free, in fact up until that moment I had been running away from it. I know that sounds stupid, why would anyone run from their freedom?

I ran because I was scared.

It frightened the living shit me because to grab hold of freedom I had to let go of all the certainty I had grown to love and hate in equal measure.

Certainty may seem reliable, even dependable, but ultimately it is a prison sentence for the weak of will, the blind and the ignorant.

People get pissed because, even though they know they are drinking poison, there is certainty in drink. They know they can come home from a hard day and find a cold welcoming beer or ten in the fridge.
I have watched close friends and family members place their bones over a weekend bar, because they want oblivion, because stupor seems easier than sovereignty.

They try to thaw their bleak existence with a pint of warm beer. They do not want to remember their life, and the Monday morning alarm is a nemesis best avoided.

People use alcohol as a hidey-hole. They also use it to punish themselves. You only have to listen to the language of a drinker to know that much; ‘I’m going to murder myself at the weekend…I’m going to get smashed out of my brains…’ and post assault, ‘I was wrecked…I was mangled…I was out of my face dying with the drink…’

People over eat because there is reliability in food. You are not going to be rejected by an XXL pizza with all the toppings. A large thin Italian is like a wool blanket on a chill night. People literally rub their hands with glee at the thought of a too much good food, even though the consequence bloats their bodies, strains their belts and pops their clogged hearts with all the strain.

Excess is the devil, no doubt, but fuck, it is the devil we all know and love.

And sexual porn? It’s the best looking woman you ever saw, on demand, and she never says no! All she asks is that you come back again tomorrow, and the next night, even and especially if you don’t want to. And she won’t take any money; she’s free. All she wants is your soul.

Put all three together – beer, pizza and a good wank – and you have the 21st century family right there.

How wonderful.

I might sound judgmental, even pious, but if I am it is as much to myself as it is to anyone reading this article (thinking ‘sanctimonious bastard’) because I have spent some time in the company of all three, and they still call out to me at times of stress and worry and stretch.

Let me tell you why I am so evangelical in my message.

Because the reliability of addictions comes at the cost of our freedom.

I don’t know about you but I’d like to get a bit more for my liberty that a fat dripping bread-and-cheese take-away, a barrel of anti-freeze and a two dimensional actor selling fake fucks for bucks.
People think they’re free but mostly they are not.

They are imprisoned in the wrong job, the wrong relationships and ultimately the wrong life. Most people look in the mirror and see the wrong face looking back at them. And they crawl to their addiction mistresses for some easy solace. They would like to escape their captivity, they really would, if only they knew how. In fact most people don’t escape their imprisonment because they are often not consciously aware that they are locked up. And if there is awareness, however faint, it is dressed in the lead-overcoat of excess and self pity and thrown in the water to ensure a drowning.
Freedom is scary because there is responsibility attached.

When you are free you have to make decisions. Choices. You. No one else, just you. You can no longer blame your wife if things go wrong, or your children because their care keeps you trapped in an unfulfilling universe, or your upbringing because ‘I had it hard’ or the government because they conspire again the likes of us.

Freedom means that you can do what you want, when you want and how you want.

You are your own Alpha and you are your own Omega.

It means you have to let go of the blame crutch and walk unaided, you have to stop waiting for the nod, and instead give yourself permission, you have to stop waiting to be discovered and discover yourself.
It’s all down to you.

How scary is that!

You have been telling yourself stories for a long time about what you would do if you won the lottery, where you would go if you had the mobility, and how you would live if you were a free man.
Well here’s the news; you are the lottery, you have the mobility, you always had it, and you are free! In fact the space ship you were born into (the body you are sitting in now) is ready and equipped to take you on the most outrageous adventures, if only you will take courage lift off.

Og Mandino, in his classic The Greatest Miracle in the World, reminds us of what a miracle we all are; our eyes have over a hundred million receptors that allow us to see our freedom,  our ears have twenty four thousand fibres to help us hear the truth, our body is equipped for any journey with its five hundred muscles, two hundred bones, and seven miles of synchronised nerve fibre, the heart that feeds those muscles with oxygen beats six million times each year pumping more than six hundred thousand gallons of blood every twelve months through more than six thousand miles of veins, arties and tubes, and within your nine pint quota of sticky red are twenty two trillion blood cells, and within each of those cells are millions of molecules each with its own atom oscillating at more than ten million times a second. And the main computer, the three pound of grey matter we call a brain contains thirteen billion cells – that’s three times more cells per brain than there are humans on this spinning planet.
Often we think of ourselves an unworthy little clods of nothing.

Actually we are a walking, taking galaxy of potential.

Who ever you are and where ever you come from you get the same basic equipment. The question is, what are you going to do with it?

You can’t keep on lying to yourself surely, about the fact that you have no advantages, that you have no choices and that freedom is but a wild fantasy for the rare few?

You can’t tell that lie anymore, because the facts against it are overwhelming. And man has already used his freedom to create the most amazing spectacles, and to live the most astounding lives, history tells us this much.

So get off that bed of depression-nettles, and stop wallowing in your supposed disadvantages, you are not inferior, you are not a slug in chrysalis, you are a Butterfly unfolding.

Don’t use your multi-billion £ piece of equipment for sweeping yards when there is a whole Universe out there for you to discover.

Be well

Geoff Thompson