An early family Christmas in my hometown, and something suddenly hits me with blinding clarity - I’ve been running away from my upbringing all my life. I’m now in my forties, so that’s nearly 30 years of flight. Soon it'll be two years of running for every one year of upbringing. Perhaps it’s time to stop and work out why I’ve spent all this time running away, as well as what I’m actually running towards.
Yet I’m hardly alone. Many of the most ambitious people I meet are also the most discontented, with many also defined more by what they are running away from, than by what they seek. Yet it's only when we work out where we are running to, rather than where we're running from, that we can be truly effective in our pursuits. At least that’s my view – as articulated in What’s Stopping You?
With my own story, I need to add two immediate caveats. This isn’t a rejection of my family, although in many cases it clearly challenges their values. My family had its problems (few don’t), and my position in it was also somewhat strained. But I am perfectly content to return home regularly – including at Christmas – and have spent many happy hours as an adult drinking late into the night with my dad, putting the world to rights over malt whiskies and sweeping statements, and have swapped much gossip and many problems with my mum over tea and cake.
And this isn’t a rejection of where I come from. Essex (American readers should think of New Jersey) has its detractors – me one of them on occasion. It can sometimes revel too much in its trashiness, although it also has some values that I think worthwhile. It’s home to more self-made millionaires than any other county and the whole place reeks of endeavour and bootstrapped achievement. There are few silver spoons in Essex, which is massively to its advantage. And in terms of effort – in everything (personal appearance as much as work) – Essex men and women would top any league table in the country.
Yet, still, I ran away. I was utterly convinced I was missing out on something. Ssomething big and exciting. And I was right. From the age of 19 I’ve lived in three cities – London, Manchester and New York – all big and bad metropolises. In some ways my three chosen cities have defined urban living since the industrial revolution and I’ve basked in the vibrancy, tension and shabbiness of all three. I’ve read their histories, explored their nooks and crannies, and learnt their secrets.
There’s a psychological side to this, however. We emerge from our childhood with hard-wired feelings of confidence – being a winner within the system we’ve encountered – or with insecurities. Of being one of the system’s losers. Quite naturally the winners are inclined to stay and enjoy the mastery of their surroundings, while the losers are keen to move on. Most definitely I was one of the system’s losers. Even at the time, I thought the education I encountered lacking: not just quality of teaching or facilities – it lacked compassion, individualism, methodology, reasoning and purpose. It was a Darwinian education – survival was all that mattered, with the closest approximation to Fred Flintstone declared the winner. What’s there not to run away from?
And the brutality of the education system spilled over into the social life of the town. Schoolmates became gangs with silly names, battling with other gangs with equally silly names: in pub car parks, behind the kebab shop, occasionally on the dance floor. Excited and appalled in equal measure, it was only after I saw a “Prize Guy” being carried to an ambulance – unconscious and hooked up to a blood-transfusion unit after an unprovoked attack from a “Baddow Surfer” – that I really saw the utter pointlessness of it all. Although prosperous, our town was culturally dead – with casual violence filling the void.
Yet it wasn’t the gang violence that alienated me from my hometown. It was my insecurities. Short, skinny and under-confident, I detested the town’s nightlife because it projected the same brutal values as the playground of my failing comprehensive school. The successful men were all large and brash, as were the nightclubs. As were the women come to that. To them all – Dave, Tracy, Steve the bouncer – I was the angst-ridden weedy guy: a pseudo-intellectual gobshite. Losing myself in the madding crowds of major cities was by far my best option.
Whether on Oxford Street, Deansgate or Fifth Avenue, being a nobody in the crowd is certainly comforting for insecure people. As Holden Caulfield discovered as far back as the 1940s, there’s something wonderfully poetic about alienation in a big city. It feels like one of those pop videos in which the singer stands motionless watching the accelerated masses whizz by.
The scale of the buildings, the bustle of the streets, the thousands upon thousands of anonymous people – wow! The loneliness – intellectual or otherwise – is more than offset by the potential of such as place. Big cities are sociable yet furtive, democratic yet cool, frenetic yet tolerant. They are everything small town exurbia isn’t – and I’ve wallowed in them all my adult life.
Yet that’s not good enough. Running away is pointless without a pursuit. Being the fox results, at best, in escape. Far better to be the hound that seeks its prey. I encounter runaways all the time when interviewing candidates for a job. Fantastically able to explain the shortcomings of their existing path (as I am at articulating the failings of my hometown), they seize up or manage only platitudes when asked where they want to go. Partly, this is because they suspect a trick question – they perhaps think the answer I seek is one of loyalty and dedication. Yet it isn’t – it would be ridiculous to expect such apostolicism from a stranger. I want the people I employ to have direction. Only then can I calculate whether our paths will coincide long enough for me to offer them a job.
Knowing where we want to end up is difficult – especially for the young. But choose a destination and the route becomes a lot clearer, and a lot more enjoyable. And most goal-setting books (including mine in WSY?) will tell you that determining an objective is enormously helped by calculating our values. Which, of course, can be informed by what we reject.
For instance, Richard Reynolds set up the Guerrilla Gardening movement because he detested the neglect of urban public spaces, especially around his home in South London’s Elephant & Castle. Meanwhile, I became involved with the City Fringe Partnership, which helps enterprise on the edges of London’s financial district, due to a similar concern for the gaps in urban life (unfortunately the CFP has now closed).
In both cases, the interloper could be accused of becoming the zealot. Yet that’s no less harsh than viewing me as a weedy pseudo-intellectual gobshite. Being the new fish keen to contribute is better than being the fish out of water, for sure. More properly, it’s our expression of love for the place we’ve found – the haven that’s not where we’ve run away from. And if we want to make it a better place, then it’s also given us direction. This makes a hound of the fox – turning our flight into our pursuit. And, suddenly, all that running away looks like it means something after all.
Happy Christmas!
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