Preference for Escape

We have a cognitive preference for some patterns that have dominated our entire thought for years, or synthesize very intense experiences. We enjoy the taste of these concepts, they are old friends, they dilate our pupils and yield the ideas that can save us.

Me, I like escape. I like the taste of it - it feels like a breeze that lifts my arms into a flying posture, like the joy of freshness and continuous reinvention.
Also there is something in the idea of being able to escape at all times that makes you feel free and safe.
Many people associate freedom with risk, and safety with living a stable, yet sometimes boring routine. But in our thoughts of escape, in the possibility of it, some of us find the safety of not being trapped in a box that is not our size.

This taste for certain notions is reflected in our aesthetic preferences.
This is also reflected in my preference in movies. At least one stream/one taste of the movies I like shows a preference that can be traced back to the concept of escape - The Cube(s), the Saw(s), Fermat's   Room, etc.  Escapes from rooms, from labyrinths, from situations, survival instinct, traps, problem-solving, cues to salvation.

Being trapped in a box, in a situation, finding your way out by using your brains and your guts has intense meaning for me. And it can take various shapes.
It can be about saving yourself from a box which is not who you are, but just a situation in which others or life has put you in.
It can be escaping the box of routine into the excitement of a brand new box of things to do and people to meet and things to be good at and act upon.

What can be out there, beyond the box, if not freedom?
But freedom and pure chaos, complete indetermination are not something pleasant for the human mind. No matter how chaotic life might seem, nobody can truly live into chaos.
So we just into a different box, an unexplored one, or one in which we can be something we like more.
They are boxes which are too tight for us, and boxes which might take us an entire lifetime to explore.
And although they are boxes, they contain you, limit you, and they are limited themselves, we might not so much mind the box, as we can at times mind the fact that we don't like it's style, it's architecture, or it's tightness on our chest.
As long as there are things to explore, and the box matches our preference, we feel free.

Yet some of the ones ultimately obsessed with freedom, might intensely get focused on getting out of the box. There is escape for escape's sake. There is detachment, refusal to participate into something that feels like a box, and the intense fear that by participating you limit yourself to the size of the box, and you might forget you are in one until it is way too late.
That I understand, I can relate to. I hold the same instinct, and it took lots of learning to accept that some boxes might be "positive", and that I can escape so much as to escape everything I really want as well.

Also, if the things we do, the people we are with, the situations in which we find ourselves are boxes, it is interesting to remember we are boxes ourselves.
We can change ourselves in time by tasting other boxes, or throwing a way the things that are too tight for our liking, yet we are limited. We have the possibility of freedom, the possibility of becoming, yet we are not free to pursue everything at the same time, we naturally want the things that fit ourselves, the box that we are, and other things don't bring us much joy, no matter how heroic of an act of freedom we might be manifesting while escaping the "prison" of our previous identity.

On our road of manifesting our freedom, we want to be open, we want to embrace change, we want to discover and explore new things, new attitudes, new preferences, but something has to remain stable. Not the same thing all the time. We can't change everything at once, no matter how fluid our identities.
The thing we might not change, when we think we are changing everything, might very well be the idea of change, the internal observer, our very detachment.

Yet detachment is a box in itself. An attitude. It might feel like the secret weapon that has help you not fall, but it is also the drive that keeps you away from the things you want to stay in, because they are you, they represent what you need and like. Detachment lures you further, it whispers seductively into your ear that you can't possibly stay here, that there might be more to see, while not letting you feel the boxes you are passing through.
But there is no depth in an escape that is detached, that comes from fear. Those escapes just make you keep on running.

Where do you escape when you have escaped everything? You end up with this box of continuous escapes, which might look very much like a labyrinth. You might be the labyrinth.
Yet you can go back, grab the piece of string, trace your way, and find those exact rooms which where more than boxes to you. The rooms in which you can build, the rooms which you can enlarge, the rooms in which you are at home, and others might want to visit.
There is no point in escaping from the places that make you feel like yourself. And if you have obsessed about escape as much as I did, that comes as a revelation.

Escape was not the point to start with, but I will always have the special relationship with it. The point was being able to move, to see, and to be authentic, without constraints. Yet that is much harder of an essence to convey into one single taste, so escape has taken its place as a symbol.

The total paradox of someone focused on escape might be escape in ourselves. You never know what you have already become in the mean time, while focusing on the previous escapes. But the forever growing, adapting, changing, yet stable box of ourselves is the only box that hold us in forever, the box with that special taste - of not just having found, but feeling at home.