thehowe_v7.1

On the walk (more like hike) home tonight, I came to a fundamental realization about myself: the unifying attribute of my favorite activities is and always has been their function as a means of escape.

Consider my favorite activities as a child: action figures, dungeons and dragons, comic books, and cartoons. Whilst playing with my action figures I would construct elaborate stories and power struggles. I did not play to model some real-world system (as in "playing house" or whatever it is girls do with their barbies), but instead constructed alternate realities into which I could escape and control. Similarly, dungeons and dragons games with my dad provided escape to an alternate world. Passively, the more obvious examples of comic books and cartoons served the same purpose. I was never and am still not the kind of person that looks for meaningful real-world analogies in my comics and cartoons (and those kinds of people do exist). A good story set in a sufficiently interesting world has always been enough.

Moving into my early teens, my primary interests shifted towards reading. For me, reading has been perhaps my most obvious means of escape throughout my life. The hallmark of a good book in my estimates is one that totally draws me into its world; even in middle school the best books would draw me in so deeply that I would regularly lose track of three or more hours at a time. Many people enjoy reading non-fiction works, or analyzing the underlying messages of their reading. In contrast, I almost always take the world presented to me at face value, and exclusively prefer fictional works - the less like the real world, the better. On the other hand, literary worlds that are not sufficiently complex quickly lose my interest no matter how fantastical they are. All of the top works on my bookshelf (Shannara, Wheel of Time, and others) define incredibly elaborate fantasies that I can escape to for days on end.

I have many interests, so I won't enumerate them all here. Suffice to say, every interest of mine that I can think of is interesting primarily in its function as a means of escape. The logical extension of this realization is that, if I wish to institute any meaningful change in my life, I must present it to myself in the form of a means of escape. This explains why I have been so unsuccessful in adopting an exercise regimen that I can sustain. In high school, I enjoyed swimming because in a sense, when I entered the pool I was escaping to an alternate world where I was physically superior (interestingly, although I swam for a long time I never really enjoyed it until I got good at it). I have never enjoyed running, and now I see why: it is too rooted in the real world. How can I escape while paying attention to my aches and pains and the terrain and the weather and all the other factors that fill my mind when running? Similarly, it explains why I enjoy the comparably arduous tasks of canoing and hiking: they are quite literally escapes from my everyday life.

This is a fundamental realization, and if properly applied could have profound effects. I must consider the matter further.