All hail escapism!

One of the definitions of “escape” provided by the world wide web includes the following: to slip away from pursuit or peril; avoid capture, punishment, or any threatened evil; gain or regain liberty.

All good, no? Basically the thing you should do when you find yourself in a bad situation. Then how come escapism has such a bad rep and basically comes down to “running away from reality“?

Why are we so quick to say that people who love to travel and love to do it a lot, or even people who work in a foreign country, are not living in the real world? Why would your search for happiness in Chile be any less real than staying stuck in what feels like a hopeless situation, just because you’re stuck in tha home country? Life is just as real when it’s good as it is when it’s bad. Maybe even more so when it’s real good, because that’s when you experience those fleeting, yet profound moments of feeling aliiiive baby!

In my book escapism isn’t running away from life, it’s running towards it. It’s trying to give yourself some breathing room in a new, preferably beautiful environment. It can make you rediscover that happiness is in fact possible, at a time you almost stopped believing it, and that you’re damn good at it too. That knowledge is a great strength that can help you through future rough patches, so that you never give up on that crazy uncontrollable rollercoaster that is life.

So yes, I applaud those who refuse to live with chains around their legs. Who dare to move, who have the great courage and wisdom to believe, or at least hope, that better is possible. Those who are willing to take that trembling step in a new direction.

And of course I don’t think that someone who has never left his city and married his high school sweetheart is a fool who is sleeping his way through life. Who am I to judge another person’s path? But it would be nice if we would stop thinking a straight path is THE way to go. Other paths are just as valuable, even those which are rarely straight, sometimes filled with exotic flowers and every now and then even have a tree blocking it. Just let it be. And don’t call it running away from reality.

Everyone has his own path in life. The future is uncertain for all of us, although we like to think otherwise. Your wife of twenty years may turn out to be a full-blown lesbian, or that wild carefree southern man you met in the African jungle may turn out to be a neurotic neat freak. No way to tell at first.

So let’s stop pretending that any of us have a better clue at what we’re doing than the rest, or that we’ve found The Path in Life. We haven’t. What works for you, doesn’t necessarily work for someone else. That would be like saying skinny jeans work for everyone. Clearly, they don’t.

So let’s embrace our differences and give each other the space to be ourselves. Whatever that means. Do what you love, and do it lots, whether it’s sitting in your couch watching reruns of The Voice or saving orphans in Nicaragua. That way we might just save each other, out here in the real world (and possibly suddenly feel a great urge to run away to a tropical island together).