Convenient Definitions

You know, I tried to read a Tom Robbins book once. I can not recall which one, but it couldn't hold my interest at the time. A few paragraphs in, my restless mind wandered away from the page and it never got a fair chance at a comeback. But today, while looking for a quote I had heard somewhere about love (“Love is the ultimate outlaw. It just won't adhere to any rules. The most any of us can do is to sign on as its accomplice. Instead of vowing to honor and obey, maybe we should swear to aid and abet. That would mean that security is out of the question. The words "make" and "stay" become inappropriate. My love for you has no strings attached. I love you for free.”― Still Life With Woodpecker), I found a bell, and it will ring in my head until I write about it.


In some book that I have been so careless as to have not yet read, he says, “Somewhere in the archives of crudest instinct is recorded the truth that it is better to be endangered and free than captive and comfortable.”
Ah. There it is. An impressively simple summation of nearly everything I struggle with, and this guy has never even met me. The statement is true to me, though I can't speak to what it means to Tom Robbins or to anyone else. It is at least mostly true of at least most people I know. Captivity has deserved negative connotations, and I just don't think that the word comfortable is feared enough. Complacency is stagnation is boredom is lifelessness, if not quite as dramatic as actual death. To be scared is to really feel. We should be in a semi-constant state of tightrope walking; holding our arms straight from our sides, teetering and thrilled and wondering if we are going to make it across shaped the same way we were when we started. Hoping we won't. Fear is growth, isn't it? Uncertainty has the ability to promise that you will end the trek surprised by your own ability to make it work, whatever that it might end up being.

This has always been my big advertisement for travel, I suppose, and for gypsyism. Go! Be uncomfortable! Revel in the conscious expansion of your own mind and your heart.

But what is captivity? In my little commitmentphobic mind, captivity is born of roots. Of love, and the anchor that love can be. Of fluorescent lighting in supermarkets and shopping at Bed Bath and Beyond. Of all the things that have become boring because I have expressed my fear of them so many times without even trying to come up with different terminology. But I am beginning to feel that I have been captive to those thoughts and comfortable in that life. The two things I regard as soul crushers, as dulling agents, have weaseled their way into my own life disguised as a manifesto of unfurling. I am comfortable with moving, and uncomfortable with staying. I am held captive by my unwillingness to fall in love with something without the guarantee of falling back out. I have managed to define my fears by the world's version of them, instead of my own.

How sneaky.