The Healing Place
Do you ever feel like running? I don’t mean for exercise. The running I mean is more like running away and not necessarily towards anything specific or towards anything you need to deeply understand? Maybe it happens at night, quietly absconding after dinner or while the family is asleep. Or in fact, maybe you consider what it would be like to vanish just before your next meeting at work, completely disappeared from the day-to-day of the life you currently know. Every responsibility left behind. Every relationship suddenly disbanded. Every anchor lifted— but, remaining is a sense of release and being weightless, buoyant and unbound in an abyss of renewal. What I am describing is not meant as an act of betrayal or deliberately abandoning the people in our lives, suddenly reneging on everything we’ve worked to build, it’s more like… escape. Not just a vacation or a retreat. No, not a reunion either. It’s a place where our feet actually touch the Earth and where we realize just how many steps they’ve taken throughout this life. It’s the type of escape that guides the tiny bells of our being towards echoing and vibrant tintinnabulation.
If we are truly honest adults, as far as our personal adulthoods are concerned, there is no roadmap. Of course we learn things like right and wrong, how to parallel park, how to open a savings account, how to vote and drive, and how to work for a living— but these are milestones somewhat imposed by society and the communities that require us to conform to the world’s ways. We borrow from lessons learned and piece together the best solutions we are capable of in most cases, but truthfully there is no distinct or absolute measure certifying adulthood. In good faith and wise measure we adults are really making it up as we plot along. If adult-ing were an equation it would also be complex, with quotients, sums, and cotangents comprised of something mathematically equivalent to hope, experience, fatigue, desperation, and to our attempt at preparing for whatever unpredictable corner we are made to turn. Needless to say, the variables often shift and arriving at a solution can be taxing. Unlike math though, good adults admit that being prepared isn’t always about having the right answer or even a completely accurate prediction of outcome. After all, it’s impossible to know where a day, or week, or a span of several years might lead us.
That we are overwhelmed with autonomy and that there is very little simplicity in life is what makes the adult’s lot so grueling. Very often we are left unrewarded for hard work or challenges we successfully face, and many times our output exceeds whatever we receive in return. Sometimes this output is financial, emotional, or physical. Sometimes it’s all three, and then some. Kids exclaim, “I can’t wait to be a grown up,” believing that they are able to be adults while still holding onto what makes them children. Jaded war-torn prophets and arm’s reach from our newest medication helping quell either anxiety, blood pressure, balding, or erectile mechanics, we adults silently think, “what kind of lousy dream is that? Just you wait kid. Just you wait.” As adults we accept that usually, help is not coming— the plan, the details, the decisions, the answer is up to us. This is part of the contract we enter into with Adulthood. Point is, every adult has thrown hands into the air in utter exasperation wanting to dash towards the horizon, disappearing somewhere in secret, even if only quick and temporarily. So be it. That’s okay. It’s okay because life is hard and also very sad. We might be happier if we became comfortable admitting this more. We loose far more than we win. Plans don’t work out regularly enough. Our children grow up. Someone no longer loves us. There isn’t enough time. Our jobs have never felt quite right. We feel alone. And, we are left juggling endless lists, hoping not to pit our most important priorities against each another. Adults tend to constantly wonder… will it work out… will I be… okay? As we yearn for reassurance, we should become better at admitting that escape, even if only like a feral reverie, is necessary— and that actually, it can be profound.
I think of escape— what might it feel like to disappear and perhaps evaporate, finding myself like a thin conscious dust between stars light years away? Sometimes, when I gently release my breath beneath the cool depths of a swimming pool I find this place and a fantasy comes true— me, peacefully adrift as like a thousand tiny particles whirling about in a dimension where sound and color have no meaning; all of me, wonderfully dissolved and blithely unobstructed by the weight of human journey. No, not like death or even a place from which I cannot ever return, but more like a space, or corridor, or a comfortable attic in the mind that’s painted with fascination. It belongs only to me and is a place somewhere crafted by my desire to be set free, billowing and unharmed. Nothing that ever needs my attention, my preparation, or any of my concern is ever there. In this place, in fact, things are restored and something so plain, so ordinary, and so necessary is recovered. It’s not a place of mortal respite, meditation, or a landscape that intellect can deconstruct. The terrain is a gratifying enigma and within it I am happily lost and glad to be astray. Maybe it’s a version of heaven or maybe some pit stop along the path towards nirvana. I don’t care. But if it can be called anything at all, its name is simply mine— a dwelling formed by the wild and tranquil chords of warbling imagination, a glowing sanctuary with wide and open doors bathed in perfect, shimmering light.
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[Photo: originally color, Mitchell Orr]
