The Great Escape
February 21, 2025Last Sunday evening, I was restless living inside that weird fog that always consumes me after midday naps. Abruptly I stood up announcing “I’m going for a walk” and when asked how far I’d be going I could only say “I don’t know.”
It’s a very similar feeling to what serves as my motivation to run. Some feeling is circulating in my mind that can’t be articulated without movement and the rhythm of one foot in front of the other is enough of a distraction that my brain can actually latch onto an idea without the need to suppress it. I guess a restless mind needs a restless body to relieve it of it’s worries.
Speaking of which, here’s the definition of “Restless”: the state of being unable to rest or relax as a result of anxiety or boredom. As far as i can tell, last Sunday was not a case of boredom. It’s hard to be bored when you have infinite music and information at your fingertips. Which leaves anxiety. Great… now the walking is a matter of unpacking what that’s about. And it wasn’t far into my walk that the art that needed to find me honed in and arrived just when I needed it.
“The Great Escape” by Patrick Watson
Bad day, looking for a way home
Looking for the Great Escape
Gets in his car and drives away
Far from all the things that we are
Puts on a smile and breathes it in
And Breathes it out, he says
Bye bye, bye to all of the noise
Oh, he says, Bye bye
Bye to all of the noise
Hey child, things are looking down
That’s OK, you don’t need to win anyways
Don’t be afraid, just eat up all the grey
And it will all fade all away
Don’t let yourself fall down
Bad day
Looking for the Great Escape
He says, bad day
Looking for the great escape
On a bad day
Looking for the great escape
The Great Escape
As this played through I was staring at this little stoop of an office for a dentist. For some reason at 8pm with no one around the little neon light blinked “OPEN”. Open for what? I wondered. As someone who has had a root canal in the last year, it’s not something I would recommend someone undergo at 8pm on a Sunday. But as I stared a little longer through the first tears that were coming down, I started to see how inviting these steps were. Much like the one’s that I’ve sat upon when I dreamed the night away with friends, knowing the reality of our current situation, the beauty of our current lives, was on its death bed.
And here in lies the problem: In the past three years, outside of my work commitments, I’ve barely spent longer than a week in one place. Having spent almost 1.5 months now in Salt Lake I’ve resolidified my understanding of the joys that come in having a home base.
It’s the way you can watch the orchid grow and bloom in the front room, the people you get to see more than twice learning about their dreams and desires and hearing how they are excited to support you in achieving yours, the art you are able to invest yourself into when you are not stressed about where you’re going to park at night, the excitement in building a wacky little tradition around Tuesday night bingo that somehow ends with a tipsy walk to McDonald’s, the fun in knowing that just because most people run the park loop counter clockwise you still choose to run it clockwise because you get to see the faces of all the regulars that run there on a sunny afternoon, helping a friend move into the city and sharing a meal with them on their empty floor, all the things that contribute to this sense of home.
As I walked around I pondered what life could be like here. What it would be to be in my mid twenties living in a thriving city. (Side bar: I have always wondered what it be like to be living the traditional mid-twenties downtown manhattan fantasy and actually enjoy it. Is it possible to switch bodies with someone for a day and feel what that’s like, cause I’m still most positive I would suffocate in Manhattan?)
Anywho, I started to see ghosts of myself in these places. The places that soon won’t be a part of what I call my “Home”. A word that’s been hard to use with full confidence, in my travels.
I know, some people will think I’m crazy for not just staying here. Settling in a while. Getting a regular job. But to no fault of the people, place, or things around me I continue to be restless. I wonder, actually it’s a 73% certainty, that this is because I have shown myself I have the choice to live this crazy and varied lifestyle, and this restlessness is a sort of travel withdrawal. After all I’m just “a bag of water with chemicals in it”.
Now I know I’m not done traveling but I’ve learned how I go about this travel is must change. I can’t ignore the great joy and curse that exists with being able to pick up and go so easily. The prospect of taking a 3-6 month job used to terrify me and now it’s becoming more appealing. I continue to throw applications out to places overseas that would ultimately end my nomadic lifestyle but replace it with the great adventure of figuring out how to navigate a foreign country. A dream that was reinvigorated as I walked around the Chinese market here in town and heard at least 5 different languages being spoken around shelves and shelves of ingredients I knew nothing about.
My friend Ethan, who has not once given up on the challenge of trying to convince me to move back to Colorado Springs, once told me “Dan you do great at living on the road alone and you do great living in one spot with your community, it’s the inbetweens that are killing you.” He’s right and that’s why I walked last Sunday.
In a week or two that in between will be upon me and I will be making decisions on what the next path is and they are as far apart and varied as all the people I love in this world. Many of them currently don’t have any set guarantees or logic to them. Just gut feelings that this could another be another avenue of growth.
I guess that’s the issue as an artist, there is no set path like there is if you want to be a pilot or a doctor. There is just an endless wandering about the forrest seeing what pictures form amidst the trees and trying to create a space that others see them too.
Do you see them?
I love you,
Dan