Travel and the art of running away

“You’re running away” is a common charge level at vagabonders of all stripes. Sometimes the criticism comes out of jealousy, sometimes out of genuine concern, sometimes a combination of those and other motivations.

We’ve written before about how to handle such a response from friends and family, but what do you say when it’s true, you are running away?

More importantly, is running away a bad thing? Does it work or does it simply postpone dealing with the problems or situations you’re running away from?

Over at Brave New Traveler Miranda Ward recently wrote about the dangers of running away and how running away did not solve her problems. It’s a very well written essay and I highly suggest giving it a read.

Ward writes:

At best, travel is a state of mind — a way of revising our views of the world and ourselves, of exploring and watching. But it’s never the answer to all of our problems, never a method of erasing anxieties, and to a certain extent this will always be a disappointment.

To a certain extent I agree with Ward, travel will most likely not magically solve all your problems.

But I say “most likely” because, well, it did magically solve many of my problems.

See, the first time I went traveling I was running away. Running away from a job I hated, a relationship that wasn’t working, a life I had allowed to happen to me rather than the one I’d always wanted. On some fundamental level I was running away from myself and yet, contrary to conventional wisdom, it worked.

Which isn’t to say I had some great personal revelation on the road. I had no profound insights that forever changed the way I look at myself and the things I was running away from and it wasn’t the places I visited that somehow changed me.

Rather something far more helpful happened: I forgot what I was running away from.

The motion itself made the things I had left behind, the things I had run away from, recede into the background. As Robert Louis Stevenson wrote: “I travel not to go anywhere, but to go. I travel for travel’s sake. The great affair is to move.”

Once I was moving, looking at what I thought were monumental problems in my life from thousands of miles and several head-spaces removed, I realized that my problems weren’t the insurmountable things I thought they were. In fact, they were so small that after nine months on the road I couldn’t even recall what they were.

In that sense, yes “running away” worked and worked well. It offered something that’s almost impossible to get when you’re trapped in the minutiae of everyday life — perspective.

So when people say “you’re running away” there’s always a part of me that wants to respond, yes, exactly, that’s the point — running, motion, the antidote to the static life that often creates our problems.

[Photo by Vincepal, Flickr]