Escaping the World--Essay One

As we grow older we do best if we recognize patterns in our life--of behavior, of the way we organize our day, of thinking, of acting. Once we recognize our patterns we are in a better position to say if we really like what we see or if it is a pattern that we would like, somehow, to break. And, if we conclude the latter, it is often more easily said than done. Changing a life is much more difficult than changing a tire.

So, we are honest with ourselves if we recognize our patterns and decide, then, what to do about them. I had the occasion to come to closer acquaintance with one of mine last week--which I will call my "tendency" or "desire" to escape from life as we know it and increasingly live in other worlds, worlds of my own creation and enjoyment. While everyone has some of this tendency in them, I think it has almost completely taken over my life, making it increasingly difficult, if not impossible for me to engage the world in anything other than targeted, time-limited and easily-identifiable tasks. I realize that this tendency was manifest in my (short) legal career (2000-2003) by an interest in trying to turn a client's problem into an interesting intellectual puzzle for myself. It was clear in my law teaching career (2003-2006) in my desire to introduce ever-longer "digressions" into class, as I pointed out interesting and little-known facts about words, legal doctrines, or historical arcana.

But then, as I combed through the files of my mind, I returned to my childhood for an explanation of why I had this tendency to retreat or escape, even though my heart, usually, told me that the way to success in life was to engage with the "real lives" of people. In the remainder of this and the next essay I will speak of what I call the "roots" and "fruits" of escapism in my life and the tensions that this has created and continues to create for me. I consider the origin, manifestation and effects of this kind of conduct.

The Roots of Escapism

I think the roots of my desire to escape the plain realities of the present were in a sense of powerlessness (and a concomitant desire to control my environment) as a child in the midst of family-of-origin realities that I didn't like. Even today I can't fully identify those family realities, but I think that the irrationality of punishment doled out when I acted out, which was quite frequent, convinced me that authority figures were not to be trusted and that the "realities" that I faced were not those which I could do anything to change. As I wrote in another essay, I didn't feel "treasured" and "protected" either in early life or in my various job situations. The way I dealt with this lack was to escape from my environment.

How so? One example will illustrate this. I recall that when I was a child I would take a list of the New York Giants football players to school with me each Monday (I clipped it from the Sunday NY Times sports page), along with the list of their opponents for that day. When I entered the school grounds, I wanted to do nothing other than sit quietly at school and memorize that list. Of course, I couldn't do that, so I had to "act out" in class to be thrown out into the hall, or sent to the principal's office (a frequent occurrence) so that I could memorize to my heart's content. Since I couldn't watch the NY Giants on TV (there was a 75-mile blackout of games in those days), and I didn't know what any of the players looked like, I would "recreate" the games in my mind, imagining Charlie Conerly throwing passes and Andy Robustelli making tackles. Indeed, when I actually saw Andy Robustelli buying some beef at Palmer's market in Springfield (Stamford), Conn. one day, I didn't know it was him; my dad had to point him out to me.

Escaping was my means of operating in life. The more I think of it, the more I see my turn to Evangelical Christianity in 1969 (we moved from CT to CA late in 1967), and my concomitant desire to memorize the Bible, as a way to "Get God" on my side in my constant battle to get some control in my universe. But I did so through escape-thinking--that is, by imagining that if God was real, and that God loved me, and that the Scriptures were true, then if I memorized and internalized the very words of truth that somehow my life would "click" on all levels. I felt that internalizing the very words of God would bring me the kind of power I sought in the world. That "power" was my interest in running things---from my life to organizations which engaged me.

This, then, was my modus operandi: (1) I would feel either dishonored or not appreciated, and so I would retreat to a world where I had power; (2) I would internalize information from that other world. At first it was football, but then it became the Bible; (3) The reason for internalizing information from that other world was to empower myself to live in the "real" world, the world from which I was escaping. But, in fact, there really was no connection between the activity I was doing as an escape (i.e., memorizing) and the skills I needed to do what I want (i.e., run the show), but I felt the two were intimately connected. If I just had my "thoughts" together, I could return to lead in the way I was supposed to lead and I wanted to lead. (4) But I discovered, increasingly, and somewhat to my chagrin, that the more I escaped, the less I became interested in or even able to re-engage in the world which everyone else said was the "real world." This would cause extreme anguish for me, anguish because I think I wanted to have an impact in the "real world," but I began to see the opportunities for that impact gradually erode and then disappear. As they disappeared, I became more and more desperate, wondering what I was doing wrong that no one was hiring me to "head" their organization or be president of their college. Then, only about a few years ago, I began to discover my freedom in pursuing anything to my heart's content. But this freedom was layered with a lot of frustration and with a little hope that by pursuing exactly what my heart desired, I would end up receiving the things that my heart desired--recognition and enough money to enable me to live comfortably.

I need one more essay to "finish" my thoughts.

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