WHAT ARE YOU RUNNING TO?

We drove the 24 miles or so with some music playing, “There’s my dad’s old office.”  “There used to be a hotel here.” “Weird how they are rebuilding houses outside a grid, each one is facing a different direction.”  On and on the memories and observations pour forth. This is driving the Coast, my childhood home.   

I’ve said before that I didn’t appreciate it growing up. I literally grew up one tenth of a mile from the Gulf of Mexico. But there’s something about the lack of waves and the calm brown water that make it look more like a big pond than the mass of water that it is.  Clearly a hurricane can pull your head out of your ass and show you the power that lies right there, flat and shallow, like you could walk shin deep to Mexico. 

When I was 17, I couldn’t wait to get away. To wherever. I thought there was more out there. There was. It’s just not too impressive. The reality is I was running away from home in the form of college.  We all want to run from something. Perhaps I should have been considering what I was running to.  

I’m not really overthinking this too much. I was 17. What do you know then?  You have a lust for the world and an insatiable appetite for many things.  Left unguided, we find nothing or the wrong things, but we always find something.  I was left unguided. 

I have been thinking about this getting away a lot lately. My daughter is a senior and I want her to get away from here. Maybe not to return. The things I found fascinating about Baton Rouge thirty years ago have decayed and remain the same or worse than when I arrived. Harsh? Maybe. I know all places look worse with time. Even as parts of the Coast have flourished, the small town I grew up in, seems a shell of what it was. I want my daughter to see something different and to greater form the ideas that will make her her. While you can do that anywhere, the exposure to more matters. Some days I don’t see a whole lot of “more” here. 

I’m hopeful for both my kids that they aren’t cursed with the “running” gene I seem to have. The one that’s telling me that there’s always something better than where I am, than who I am. This gene needs no zip code and you can go anywhere and it’s waiting. If you have it. Then you know. Detroit, Mississippi, Louisiana. It’s there. Waiting to ask what’s next. What will you need to be fulfilled?  Where do you want to run to next?  

There’s a sarcastic coincidence (think: what you believe is irony) in the fact that I’m a runner. That I spend hours each week running. Away and to. Faster. Slower. Mostly to nowhere. I don’t ever consider running with chasing though (there’s the irony) it’s during these jaunts that I consider a lot of what I say here. “What will give you satisfaction? What will make you give up the chase?” I cant run this exhaustion out. It stays fresh at the end of a run, just as it started. Some days I’ll have a complete and full thought of what I want in the middle of a run. I guess this is the dopamine or seratonin or something firing off. At the end of the run. I’ve returned back to the start, of both the run and the mindset. And I still don’t know where I’m running to. 

#hugsandhi5s