Driving home from happy hour last night, I looked at the already-darkening sky and thought about leaving. Not leaving anywhere in particular, just the idea of leaving; doing this, I realized something about myself--I’m really good at it. Leaving, that is. I’ve left lots of places.
I left a music festival once--The Gathering of the Vibes. It was a terrible, terrible place, so overcrowded that people began to resort to things that I won’t even mention on here...let’s just say there were issues with the facilities and leave it at that. It was almost a hundred degrees out and tens of thousands of people were camped in an open field. I was supposed to be working, but everything was so out of control I realized no one was going to bother to try to find me. A brief but violent thunderstorm put the sound system out of commission for a good long time and turned the already befouled field into a mud pit. I was out of there.
I left a pagan gathering once--Womongathering. I still have the little clay woman used as an ID badge--I was supposed to be working there, too--hanging from my rearview mirror. I left Kripalu, a yoga center in Western Massachusetts, after only four of the seven days I was supposed to be there--yep, you guessed it, working. I never knew there could be such sensory deprivation in a place like that, and it drove my 22 year-old self mad. And then there’s my most recent leaving incident this past summer, which I never would have predicted.
I left all of these places for the same reason--because I was unhappy. There was always a different reason for my unhappiness--trust me, the ‘facilities’ at Kripalu were so far superior to those at The Vibes it isn’t even fair to call them by the same name--but unhappiness is what it always boils down to. I left because I was unhappy. And--I left because, well, I could.
But what happens when I can’t leave? This is where my thoughts took me last night, on the way home from happy hour, looking at the sky not at the road. What happens when the thing making me unhappy isn’t even a thing that is leave-able? What about when the thing that is making me unhappy isn’t even a THING? What then? Where do I go now?
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Tracy, I totally get what you're saying. Thoreau said, "the mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation," and I think that's true. Some just disguise it more than others.
ReplyDeleteThis is going to sound silly maybe, but I know some people find knitting and crocheting a helpful outlet. Or learning to play guitar. The latter is what I'd really like to do. Writing is also a helpful way to work through these sorts of feelings, but somehow, music says it even better.