On The Run

When you run and you keep running, is it just running away?

Or is it running towards a destination?

Is there a difference?

And if there is – how do you know which it is?

I’m not talking about running for exercise – there is a goal with that. Fitness perhaps. Or just an obsession with movement.

When you are running from the life you are living where is the message in that?

I began wanting to run away from home when I was age three. I didn’t get very far. On a dark early winter evening, a suitcase packed with my doll’s clothes, my doll in my arms. Standing at the front door, on the balls of my feet trying to reach the doorknob. “Where will you go?” asked my mother. “To Aunt Margaret’s” my reply. Only problem with that – I didn’t have an Aunt Margaret and we both knew it. Still, she let me go. Waved me off in fact as I made my way down the stairs from the porch to the sidewalk. And in the dark, I turned to my right and started walking. I didn’t get very far before I turned back and walked through the door saying “Aunt Margaret isn’t home.” And even though I walked through that door, it didn’t feel like I was “home” either.

We repeated this futile dance several times during my childhood. Sometimes it was because I didn’t get my way for something I wanted. Sometimes it was just me having had enough of the tension, the strife and the toxicity of everyday life, with the need to “go”. No idea where I needed to be, but it wasn’t in that house. It was a need to be saved, to feel safe, to be rescued. It was long before I knew my role was to be that of liberator.

When I was age nine, until my tenth birthday, I thought I’d found the place I didn’t need to run from. And while I had been reluctant to make the move to that small town in the Niagara Peninsula, I came to feel at peace with my surroundings. The home life was a bit more settled, though there were undercurrents that I wasn’t aware of because I was so wrapped up in my new freedom and much too young to understand. The idyll didn’t last because only months after my tenth birthday we were right back where we had started, not just the same city, in that same house. Into that same old toxic environment.

And the stirrings of unrest, the desire and the need to flee were being stoked on a regular basis. I had tasted the freedom that my spirit needed, and I was beginning to know too much. What is called in psychology terms as “the unthought known”.

By the age of fourteen I no longer needed to be the runaway. I needed someone else to leave and made clear what the terms were. The conditions were met and I carried a lifetime’s worth of guilt for that ultimatum. My own guilt and that placed upon my child’s shoulders by adults who should have known better, not to mention done better.

Over the last few months my ten year old self has been whispering in my ear. We’ve finally ditched that guilt. We’ve come to terms with where we are in this moment. And we know that while we can’t see the future, we know that the world awaits and there is a path we are meant to take. We took a few detours over the years but we’re ready to realize all those dreams that we started to plan all those years ago. We’re not running this time, we’re walking confidently, hand in hand to whatever awaits.