The Joy of Escape

Shelter, London Blitz (public domain)

I’m not talking about a trip to Hawaii here.  Escaping a big negative is a powerful reward, one that can be accompanied by powerful emotions.  My community’s "One Book" selection this year is Rebecca Solnitt’s A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities that Arise in Disaster (which I thought was excellent, by the way; 2009, Viking).  Solnitt quotes a young woman describing her feelings of relief after making it to a shelter and surviving a bomb during the World War II London Blitz:  "It seems a terrible thing to say, when many people must have been killed and injured last night; but never in my whole life have I ever experienced such pure and flawless happiness" (p. 103).  She was not alone.

For most of us, the joys of escape come on a much smaller scale in less tragic circumstances.  When I read this passage, I flashed back to a sensation I’d experienced years ago.  I was a commuter cyclist for decades, but the statistics eventually caught up with me and I got hit by a car, fracturing my back as well as suffering many minor injuries.  The accident occurred during a stressful time in my life and, weirdly, even during the immediate aftermath, I had a feeling of liberation from those other problems.  I’d escaped from them--albeit not in a way I would have chosen--and could simply appreciate being taken care of and working on recovering. My bicycling had been punished pretty strongly by this powerful negative consequence, but when I recovered, I did eventually get back to it.