We all know that life can be tough. We wish that we had a great and easy time each and every day. It would be nice if our days were stress-free and our relationships were easy. Yet, if you have lived even one day, you know that life is 50/50. We have our ups and we have our downs.
The problem that many people run into is that when they are having the down portions of their life, they run from it. They avoid the discomfort, the fear, the uncertainty that life brings when we are in the valleys of our lives. We start resisting and avoiding the problems that we are facing. We will embark on indulgent thoughts and indulgent actions simply because we do not want to face what will actually make us stronger.
Avoiding our emotions and our thoughts is the means of escapism. We will use different substances to drown out our thoughts. We will use different activities to keep us from feeling unpleasant. This act of escaping is what causes us to play small when we want to achieve great things in our lives.
Why are you escaping?
Sounds like a strange question, doesn’t it? “Why do you think I am escaping?” is most likely the reply you’d give if someone asked why you’re trying to get away from your current life. And I get it. I fully understand the allure of escaping your current circumstances. Trying to get a business up and running can be maddening. Now amplify that for seven years, and not being able to get the bird off the ground? You know it’s possible—you’ve seen people do it almost daily—yet for whatever reason, you can’t seem to get your business off the ground.
So, when you start thinking about how terrible you are as a salesman, or thinking that entrepreneurship just isn’t your thing, it’s easy to want to just turn on the television and watch a movie, or play a video game for four or even eight hours. It’s easier to do anything else than what you think the next step should be.
You want to try to improve the connection between you and your wife. You feel the distance between you and her even though y’all are in the very same house. She’s not even 20 feet away, just on the other side of the wall. She’s not mad at you; in fact, you hear her giggling at a television show she’s watching, and you’re in the living room wondering how to not sound stupid going into the bedroom to try to form some type of connection. It’s easier just to sit there and tell yourself that it doesn’t matter. It’s easier to sit there and turn on that PlayStation or go to some porn site than it is to walk 20 feet into the bedroom.
Escaping is the easy part. But when you do escape, you are actually escaping from what you really want to do. You want to have the relationship that you had back when you first were married. What does that entail? I can tell you for sure that avoiding the hard stuff isn’t it. If it were, then you wouldn’t have won her heart in the first place. It took doing the scary stuff, the uncomfortable stuff, to win her hand in marriage. And it takes that same kind of effort—yes, the awkward conversations, the long silences, the emotional risks to keep her hand in marriage.
So what are you really escaping? What is it that you’re truly trying to avoid? These are the questions you need to look at and examine. Come clean with yourself. Because you’re going to come up with every excuse possible as to why you think your wife doesn’t want a deep, connected relationship with you. But if that were truly the case, she would’ve already left. She’s waiting for you just as much as you are waiting for her.
What are you escaping?
What is it that you’re truly running from? We have the excuses that we make, but those are just thoughts. We have thoughts about the reactions our wife might have. We have reactions to our own thoughts about what she’ll say. All of this dodging, shocking, hiding, and escaping doesn’t do anything for us.
Our escaping keeps us from achieving the goals that we want. We escape from our goals. We escape from the life we want. We escape from the relationships we want. So why do you escape, and what are you escaping?
The answer? To avoid discomfort. We avoid feeling insecure in front of our wives. We escape feeling like a business failure. We escape feeling like an embarrassment or a complete and total loser. And though that sounds like a good reason to escape, it’s not.
Because what we’re escaping is actually our own thoughts about our circumstances. Our circumstances have no power over us. They are truly neutral. The only thing that makes them unpleasant is our thoughts about them. So you can actually change your thoughts about the circumstance and be perfectly okay with it.
When you escape, you prevent yourself from facing the music. Sure, you’re in a different frame of mind for a moment, but you have to return home. You have to return to the very life you were trying to escape from. That escape is a temporary fix that only makes the problem louder when you come back. And as you avoid the circumstance and your thoughts about that circumstance, you compound the pain and suffering each time.
So if you want to truly escape, the best thing you can do is square your shoulders and face the problem head-on. Have the hard discussions. Be willing to be a beginner again. Allow yourself the opportunity to learn new things about your wife, even if you’ve been married for 20 years. If you want to truly escape the unpleasantness, lean into that part of your life and grow from it.
Can you escape and still be good with what you come back to?
When you learn and grow from your experiences, you can actually take a break—you can escape to a galaxy far, far away for a couple of hours and then come back and still enjoy where you are now. But to do that, you have to do the work. You have to clean up your thoughts and emotions around your circumstances. And then it will be okay to learn new things. You’ll be okay being in a learning environment. You’ll be okay with discovering new aspects of your wife. Okay with dropping the ball, picking it back up, and keeping on going.
When you can be okay with the life that you’re in, escaping is no longer an escape. It’s just a vacation.
