She’s Leaving Home
Wednesday morning at five o’clock
as the day begins
Silently closing her bedroom door
Leaving the note that she hoped
would say more
She goes downstairs to the kitchen
clutching her handkerchief
Quietly turning the back door key
Stepping outside she is free…
— Lennon/McCartney
I’ve left home many times in my life. Leaving and freedom were deeply intertwined. Up, out and away. Away to school. Away to summer camp. Away to college. Away to Europe, to California, to Mexico, to Tierra del Fuego. Away to China. Away to India. I’ve been off to see all the Wizards of all the Ozes I’ve ever heard of. As with the Beatles song, most of my leaving left a someone behind who expected me to stay. It wasn’t clean. I felt better, but someone else felt worse. And the issue wasn’t resolved, only boxed and put into the basement. I gained a sense of freedom, a space to grow in ways stifled by my past. Leaving relieved the pressure. The weight lifted. I soared like a helium balloon released from a small child’s fist. I felt free— but wasn’t free of the underlying problem that brought me to these crises again and again. Staying wouldn’t necessarily have helped. I’ve watched people stay and die spiritually while their bodies dutifully plod on, coping by cropping their lives to fit the tight frame of their conditions. To this day I support leaving when staying feels like dying.
I am also a big fan of learning to leave well and fully and with no regrets, all loose ends tucked into the weave of your life. That’s a key skill for “feeling free in a finite world.” It may take years – even a lifetime – to learn this.
Come, come whoever you are:
Wanderer, Worshiper, lover of leaving;
Come though you have broken your vow
a thousand times before;
Ours is no caravan of despair
Come, yet again, come.
— Rumi, 13th century Persian mystic poet
Yes, I was a lover of leaving. Leaving gives a jolt of freedom when waters of boredom or frustration start to rise. I’d developed a persistent habit of leaving and I had no idea where it came from, why it was there. Sometime, something might have been so painful that I began loping away from my own reality in long, steady strides, afraid that some sin would be unearthed, that I would be “found out.” From then on I always had some furtive feeling of being on the lam. Every few years I’d pour out my soul to some listening ear like a drunk telling over and over a tragic story to a bartender whom he’d never see again. Soon, I’d be busy again – and disconnected from the pain.
Rumi changed my direction, literally. The road to freedom now seemed more like returning than leaving. Returning again and again, deeper and deeper. If I had to leave to feel free, I realized, I wasn’t free. And I was running out of “away.” You can run but you can’t hide…
Two freedoms
I call leaving messes “cheap thrills” and leaving well ” deep thrills.” Moving beyond a vexing constraint is thrilling. It gives that glorious sense of freedom we all crave. But how you get through the door, over the wall, or out of the trap – that’s the difference between cheap and deep thrills. Completing a divorce is the same – a real liberation or a temporary stay of relationship pain. In our mediated and medicated world, it’s ever easier to get a cheap thrill. You can get helicoptered in to the summit rather than climbing the mountain.
The movies can take us through thrill after thrill without leaving our seats. We hold our breath when the hero swings across the chasm or goes into battle with the enemy. We breath again when challenge is met successfully – oh, but wait, here comes another! Eventually, though, the movie’s over, the last page of the book is turned and we expect resolution. We want the problem to be over. The lovers to get married. The crew to arrive home alive. The villain to be out of commission. We want resolution without risk – a classic cheap thrill.
We want to choose our thrills and have them leave us exhilarated but essentially unscathed. We want to land the contract, hike the Grand Canyon, win the game – but eventually ‘go home’ to a good meal, a warm bed, and a safe tomorrow. Unfortunately, so many of the ways we seek the thrill of feeling free leave us more trapped than more free. Our strategies for freedom turn out to be our next prisons. We think we have escaped only to find ourselves in a box canyon with the coyotes of our own fears and failures stalking us again.
I wish cheap thrills worked for more than just a reprieve from the problem. I really really really do. If they did, we’d be a very happy 61/2 billion campers here on earth. But cheap thrills just separate act from consequence over the short term. They give us a sense of freedom without increasing the real circle of freedoms within which we live. Deep thrills come when the issue is squarely addressed and all consequences have come home to be accepted, loved, forgiven, and allowed to be. Deep thrills come when act and consequence are consciously linked. When the risks are accepted before we act. When we plunge with eyes wide open. When no matter what the outcome, we feel free-er at the end.
Let’s party
Our lives are full of cheap thrills, and sometimes you just want to party and so what? If the stakes are low, so what indeed? We all need to let off steam safely. Even the highly conscious and highly virtuous have little ways they get away with things. Break some rule when they are all alone. Every famous person, every spiritual leader, every hero has little sins they enjoy in private. In fact, paparazzi make a life’s work out of catching them doing it. We all work around life’s unflinching conditions – if we can’t botox and tummy tuck the ravages of age, we cinch them in and smooth them out with lycra. If we can’t leave for good, we leave for a night with the girls. As long as the family is fed and bills paid, a lottery ticket every so often can take the edge off feeling too poor to have more. These don’t make us free, but they allow us to feel free for a few hours.
The more we can joyfully own our cheap thrills, the more innocent they become. If a husband can admit to his wife that he needs a night a month with his buddies at a strip club to be the loyal, loving guy he is the other 720 hours a month, and if his wife can assert that she’s gotta spend at least $100 a month, no-questions-asked, on stuff he doesn’t know about to be the nurturing, honest mate he wants – well, I say let them celebrate one another’s cheap thrills. Admitting your cheap thrills to others can be very liberating. What do you do for cheap thrills? Could you tell someone you know and ask them to tell theirs – without any shock or moralizing? Would the world be a better place if parents, kids, ministers, teachers, leaders, working stiffs could all get in a big circle and each one admit to one regular cheap thrill?
Here, I’ll go first. I do retail therapy. I’m a local thrift-store sport shopper. Sometimes nothing else satisfies as much as putting on my backpack, grabbing my debit card and walking 6 blocks into town to cruise the aisles of this hometown establishment where every penny I spend feeds people in need on my little island. It’s rare I’ll spend more than $10 a week on this habit. It’s better than chocolate. I get hours if not days if not years of pleasure from these little things – and from the pride at scoring for $5 something that retails for fifty bucks. It’s a multi-dimensional cheap thrill. And if it doesn’t pass the test of time, back it goes to be sold again and buy another dinner for an unknown neighbor.
Cheap and deep don’t mean Good and Bad. They are different strategies for release from the prison of smallness. Different strategies for getting some space back into a shrinking, crowded life. Different ways to tear down the walls, slice through complexity, relieve frustration, open possibility, blow off steam. The feeling of freedom is that deliciousness of having a buffer of space and time. Of having room to move.
Every dieter knows the cheap thrill-deep thrill distinction. Cheap thrill: ice cream. Deep thrill: fitting in to your dress.
Cheap thrills range from such innocent habits that hurt no one at all to boondoggles that cost people and other living things dearly. Workers at every level of corporations, from grunts to ‘masters of the universe,’ pilfer. Some take post-its and tools. Some take millions. Cheap thrills are especially dangerous when mistaken for deep thrills. When the little rush you get when you’re enjoying your ‘substance abuse’ is mistaken for freedom, you lose your freedom. Unfortunately, most of what passes for freedom – especially in America – is a cheap thrill.
Let’s look at some other cheap thrills, things we do to buy a little breathing room physically or psychologically by ignoring consequences.
My innocent “retail therapy” writ large in America is a consumption habit that’s out of control and unsustainable. For all their utility, credit cards have become the instruments of cheap thrills – that aren’t in the long run cheap at all. The credit card companies don’t care that you can’t pay off your debt – in fact, if you pay the minimum monthly charge, it just means they get to milk you for interest for several years. This is a perfect metaphor for the consequences of ignoring consequences. You get a little room in the present but the pinch comes later.
Sometimes cheap thrills are called “hedonism” – unrestrained pleasure seeking. Too much sex, drugs, and rock and roll will get you in the end. The deep thrills of enduring relationships, natural highs, and music made rather than consumed are lost.
What we call freedom is often simply the cheap thrill of forgetting limits because you have privilege - a form of power that allows you to farm out your limitations to others. If you are strapped for time but not money you can buy the labor of others. If your influence takes you farther than you can walk, you can buy a car, a phone, a computer and travel at ever greater speed. The quest for freedom in America is the quest for mastery of time and space. It’s a “cheap thrill” when it’s an illusion of mastery, when you’re just fast and far, not free. If you depend on fast and far as your freedoms, you will never have enough of either. There is always another gizmo for faster and farther.
Infinity now?
Face it – we want infinity… now. If we could just forget about death and the golden rule, it would let us pursue infinity as though we might actually catch it. Wisdom is living in the limitations of time and space with an infinite mind and heart. How can you “have it all” in a world of other people and things not subject to your will? A tyrant or a king might appropriate the labor and possessions and land of another, but still cannot “have it all” through all time and all space. All empires fail. In the larger universe, harmony returns. The law of reciprocity rules – that all life is here to serve all life, and everyone and everything together makes a multifaceted diamond-like whole. Everything and everyone is a note in the uni-verse – the one-song. Everything and everyone is a reflection of everything and everyone in an infinite interconnected web of relatedness.
The solution is not to stop wanting to expand once your conscience has awakened to the reality of the presence of others, but to find a way to feel free in a finite world. The fact of limitation on this earth is a pressure cooker for the soul. It forces an ethical evolution, because the alternative is feeling free through ignorance – and eventual domination by that which you dominated. There is a way to co-exist as free beings in a free world, but it requires a maturity far beyond what most of us have developed. Democracy and anarchy both have this as their core ideal – free beings in respectful relationship that involves a lot of give and take, but never requires give and give and give or condones take and take and take.
Cheap thrills come from unilaterally separating action from consequence, self from others, now from the past, mind from heart. Separation is often healthy if you’re stuck in something deadly, but if it’s one sided and laced with fear or anger, it leaves a trail of crumbs that allows what was left out or behind to find you. When freedom means no holds barred, then the freedom to consume becomes greed, sex becomes licentiousness, “I gotta be me” becomes compulsive selfishness. The curious thing about this kind of “freedom” is that it quickly becomes addictive: addicted to shopping, sex, booze, and the other cheap thrills. Addiction by definition is the most un-free psychological condition we can enter. Thus cheap thrills can be identified by their un-free (compulsive/addictive) nature.
Deep thrills come from bringing back together the pieces that we separated. When nothing has to be excluded from your consciousness or your life, a capacity to breath deep and relax comes that is beyond all the cotton-candy pleasures of existence.
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