You Can Run, But You Can’t Hide

At any given time, I have three or four draft pieces on the go. Some get finished over a day or two, other take longer and sometimes, I’ll shelve an article for weeks until I figure out just the right wording.

I’d been working on a piece about the ways in which we fight or attempt to evade life, but hadn’t gotten much beyond the first paragraph. Then a friend posted something on Facebook that got my brain working and in the course of typing out an overly long reply to his status, I figured out how I wanted to approach the article.

Photo by roujo

In the past, I’ve written about the need to take the wheel when it comes to determining your direction in life and not simply sitting back and letting life happen to you. In the immortal words of Dr. Betty Dodson, it’s called “getting on top and running the f*ck.” But there’s a distinction to be made between showing life who’s boss and taking an adversarial approach to it and to yourself. Making deliberate decisions and not ceding control over your future to the whims of fate is one thing,  but actively trying to deny reality or living in fear of being unable to outrun your own nature and and the repercussions of your past decisions is a very different matter. The problem with taking an adversarial stance toward anything (yourself, life in general) is that eventually you’re going to let your guard down or get distracted and it’s going to knock you flat on the floor with a haymaker to the jaw. No matter how many rounds the fight lasts, you can never count your opponent out. And getting back on your feet is that much harder because you’ve only ever thought of  yourself or your circumstances as the enemy and haven’t developed the tools or skills to work with it vs. struggling against it. Antagonism can only take you so far before you need a less exhausting strategy to navigate the world.

And for a lot of us, that less exhausting strategy seems to hinge on outrunning ourselves. Maybe it’s because spring is in the air, but lately I’ve heard more that a few people (and I count myself among them) waxing poetic about ditching it all and disappearing. Just walk out the door and don’t look back. A cave in Morocco, the next flight to Japan, an emo song about Boston. It all comes from the same place. We’re not just running away from our lives, we’re also longing to run directly into the arms of the Other, the other being the self we imagine that we could be if we could only get a little space from our current versions, enough distance between here and there, if we could only get far enough away, we could finally be who we’ve always thought we had the potential to be, free from the shackles of our flawed, workaday selves. As if unfamiliar surroundings and the very nature of being a stranger in a strange land would allow us to unlock our untapped potential and to reinvent ourselves in the idealized image in our minds without that pesky business of our past interfering. But even if we do ditch it all with only a passport and credit card in hand, the newness of wherever we land will eventually wear off, we will unwittingly develop routines, a familiarity of place and space and we will come to know and be known (and to be known is to be judged, by others and ourselves) and we’ll realize that there was no transfiguration – merely our same selves on another coast, in another country (check out Up in the Air or listen to this gem* if you don’t believe me). And we feel as if we’ve failed, as if we missed the window of opportunity that would have let us emerge from our cocoons as individuals stronger, braver, better than the sad sacks we left behind. This is a fantasy, of course. Short of reincarnation, there is no such thing as alchemy of the self. There is no alternate version of us waiting to be set free in Sao Paolo, Saigon or San Diego.  But the idea that he/she is out there, waiting to be summoned from the bench to pinch hit for our current iteration is a seductive one.

It comes down to externalizing – externalizing your own nature as something to be struggled with, externalizing life (or LIFE) as a separate entity with designs on bringing you down instead of simply the context in which you exist as created by your cumulative experiences, decisions and social realities (these might be outside of your immediate influence, but that doesn’t mean you should let them define you) and subject to change based on purposefully seeking out new experiences and making different choices in the future.

No matter how we romanticize it (and I’ve thought about writing a how-to guide to faking your own death, so I know from romanticizing) “fighting” life or “running” from yourself is just another way of abdicating control. If we acknowledge that we’ve created and empowered the very fears we’re trying to escape from and if we’re strong enough to do the hard work, we can deconstruct these emotional and intellectual straw men with our own two hands and not in six months at an ashram in India. Right here, right now.

*Will never get tired of linking to this vid. NEVER.