Monday, May 14, 2007

Running Away


Have any of you ever thought of just running away... from your life? I think it is something many of us feel from time to time, wanting to be free of all the problems and worries in our lives. Sometimes even wanting to flee from the people in our lives.

I have felt that of late, wanting a new beginning. Being able to start life over with all the lessons I have already learned would be the ticket. Avoiding all the serious blunders in our past, choosing the road not taken. You have to wonder though if anything we do can really change our fate. Are our lives not already pre-ordained for us?

I am a strong believer in fate. Both the good and the bad. Sometimes I think that our lives are already pre-set. The day of our death can not be changed or avoided, it will come when it is the right time. The choices we've made in life were all in the plan that fate (or God) had set for us. It certainly makes you feel powerless sometimes.

Then there are those who believe that we make our own destiny. The two schools of thought are not mutually exclusive. You may have been pre-ordained to be a person who takes life by the short hairs and runs with it. You may think you're in control, but it's your life's plan being played out, as scripted.

If you have a strong religious faith you may call it God's Plan. Others may call it fate. Calling it God's Plan does make it seem more palatable. To feel there is a guiding hand, someone or something that has your best interests at heart and will lead you to a happy ending. Fate does not necessarily have that happy ending component. I find great comfort in the God's Plan theory. Even though I am mostly an agnostic.

No matter how you slice it though, it seems pretty amazing, and frightening all at the same time. Every day a journey, whose script was written long ago.

But getting back to the running away theme (above), there is a song in Into the Woods called No More, where a father and son are discussing running away from their lives. The father sings to his son, "the trouble is son, the farther you run, the more you feel undefined". He concludes by singing, "where are we to go, where are we ever to go". The moral of this tale, and our own, is that you can't really run away from life, we are who we are and nothing can change that.