Personal Essay: Running Away at 60 by Susan diRende

“Wherever you go there you are” is one of those clever cautionary sayings, in this case meaning you can’t run away from unhappiness. The pointing finger in this bit of wisdom is aimed squarely at the would-be escape artist, which is less than helpful to a person already feeling poorly about herself. If your unhappiness is caused by something inside you, the thinking goes, then running off anywhere else will only bring that source of unhappiness right along with you. But you know what doesn’t travel right along with you? All those other people. The ones who drove you crazy. The ones who let you down. The ones who broke your heart. 

I was running from disappointed dreams in a state of cheerful despair, a mix of a sunny, outgoing nature and an itchy, peeling rash of disappointments. Nothing particularly terrible had happened. A close friendship had evaporated in a way that felt like a death. My films and writing languished on the maybe shelf. I lost my house of 10 years to AirBnB. My dog died. It was too much for me to embrace turning 60 with empty arms. I opted for running away, using the cover story that I was running toward something. A year of adventure. A quest for renewal. Everybody seemed to buy it, even me.
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I had a sense of now or never for finding all the things that had eluded me in my life. I took the random road of a vagabond with only my first destination set and a suitcase my only baggage. I picked New Zealand for starters, a country I knew nothing about except that it was as far away as I could get from LA and that there was an artist residency center there.

I went hoping to find something. Instead I lost things. My cell phone at the southernmost tip of New Zealand. My beloved Fendi coat, purchased for a couple thousand dollars in 1980 and treasured until it vanished in the Charles de Gaulle airport. An earring. A thumb drive. A scarf. Pens. I don’t know how many cups of coffee I put down for some reason and then left behind. 

I lost intangibles as well. The first was the idea that I’d find my “purpose.” That there was going to be an epiphany with a capital E. I figured that out pretty quickly down in the antipodes among the cows and sheep. A month-long dream-residency in Mexico fizzled in the noisy, messy reality of road resurfacing outside my balcony. The intermittent crash of cobblestones dumped on the dirt, the radio blare, the chatter of the workers, and the miasma of dust in the air made working, much less revelation, impossible. I saw why some people never take to travel: the disappointment at the amount of gutter trash lining the streets in Rome, the diesel fumes overwhelming the smell of spices in the Tangier souk, the bitterness of coffee in Amiens.

With all the losses, you’d think it would have been a miserable year. But in the empty spaces, somebody I hardly knew kept showing up. Someone who painted cows and sheep, not cityscapes. Who knew the names of the pasture grasses: cocksfoot, dock, rye, plantain, and the fizzy Yorkshire fog. Their blooming was subtle, though if you caught them in the light at dawn and dusk, they shone with gold and silver. The way they littered the pasture walk like a wedding chapel path in a natural cycle of new renewal perfectly reflected my stay. 

The kindness of the people soothed me through the itchy healing of emotional scabs. After my 4-month summer there in the Southern Hemisphere, I was ready for a second one in the Northern, ready to face the known world and see what it had in store for me. Before I departed New Zealand, I took myself on a tourist excursion by car to the Pinnacles, a set of imposing rock cliffs near the southern tip of the island where some scenes from the Return of the King had been filmed. I mean, you can’t go to New Zealand and not pay a pilgrimage to the relics of Middle Earth.

I had a grumpy start to the day. I don’t actually like the LOTR movies and hadn’t bothered to watch the last one. I was going to “see the elephant” since I doubted I’d ever be back. Then I got lost. Twice. I took back roads and wandered somewhat randomly past penguin crossing signs and fields of hay bales that reminded me of the hair curlers my mother used to wear. 

Then it hit me. I was happy, surprisingly happy, grinning so hard it hurt my cheeks. The day kept changing from gloriously blue, to cloudy, to drizzly, then back to bright again. My eyes stung as if I might cry. I started singing loudly, operatically as I drove. The lyrics were simply the word “happy” over and over, drawn out, repeated, warbled, and crooned. Each time I sang the word, I became more and more just that: happy.

When the two-lane I was on climbed a hill near Palliser Bay and I could see nothing but sky beyond, I felt as if I might fly up out of my body. The girl in me who had memorized the songs in Mary Poppins and still knew all the lyrics jumped out of the memory of magical sidewalk paintings and dancing penguins. For a moment she was driving,  imagining the car would do a Chitty-Chitty-Bang-Bang leap into the sky.  

Seeing a lone cow on a distant hill, I experienced no boundary or distance between us, but rather an unbroken continuum of molecular interpenetration, an ecstasy of pure being without differentiation. I was the cow. The cow was me. We were connected to each other and the whole world. 

It struck me that this day would not have been possible in the company of another human. Belting tunelessly in a car, if it didn’t annoy the other, certainly would have had to shift to include them. I couldn’t imagine my boundless state surviving the presence of another sentient will. Suddenly the cave-dwelling hermit made sense to me, not rejecting the rest of humanity, but seeking the rest of the world that is only possible when alone.

In one day, all the pain from when I’d left was cancelled out. I flew back to Los Angeles just as the season where I was turned into full autumn, ready for a second summer traveling around the United States. 

I visited every place I’d ever lived, riding the rails looking for clues to a more authentic future in the haunts of my past. I was struck instead by how devoid those places were of any trace of me. Returning revealed no echo of the person I’d been. If time is a river, each place was its own branching stream, and the space my feet had filled closed up like water once I’d stepped away.

It was such a relief.

I always judged my younger self by the standards of much older siblings. That summer, I lost my attachment to who I was as in “I’m this kind of person.” Silver Spring had no record of the dutiful daughter. Seattle carried not a trace of the sparkling performer. Madison, Wisconsin knew itself to be a lovely college town, but didn’t know a thing about grad student me. Annapolis forgot both my name and the name of that fellow I loved who left me. Susan was nowhere to be found. 

I felt lighter and happier. I lost the need to be consistent, to be considerate, to be good. What started appearing in the empty spaces was happiness. Like that first experience of it in New Zealand, I wasn’t happy about anything in particular. I wasn’t clear as to why. I was just happy. Sometimes with a capital H. 

What I got in the year of travel was a list of “happiest days of my life” that have nothing to do with achievement or relationships. Driving under an Iceland fjord down a tunnel that was so steep to almost qualify as a cliff or carnival ride. Strolling In Madrid at Thanksgiving, the elaborate platforms and costumes of the buskers becoming my own Macy’s Day Parade. Finding myself absolutely alone in the wintry ruins of Pompeii with only a stray dog and the wind. A poem by Auden about traveling that felt like it was written to me. New Year’s Eve on the Pont Alexandre in Paris, celebrating at the chime of midnight with strangers. Happiness for no reason. Laughter among strangers. Life as it comes. ​