Slaying Our Giants

One of my current ongoing projects is planning a trip this summer for my two kids and me.  For the record, it’s not that we don’t want my husband to go with us, and he’d love to go. . . but he’s staying behind because (a) he won’t have accrued a week’s paid vacation until he has been working at Amazon for a full year, which won’t happen until September, and (b) part of the reason for the trip is to get Mariah out of the house so that he can do some work on the walls in her room.  So. . . I’ll take off with the kids, and her room can be a work in progress that no one is sleeping in for a week or so.  Right now, the plan is to go to Phoenix to see the Braves play during the last week in May. . . exactly what the travel looks like going out and coming back is still in the planning stages.

Yes, I know that many people will think I’m insane for traveling by car to the other side of the country with a 12 year-old (well, he will be by then) and a non-neurotypical 10 year-old.  However, it wouldn’t be the first time I’ve taken these two by myself on a long road trip: we went to Denver during spring break three years ago (as in, they were three years younger than they are now), and even the challenging moments of the trip (the most memorable of which was a major Mariah meltdown in the bathroom at the Wyoming Welcome Center. . . I still believe that the older couple who was sitting near the door when we came out was convinced that I was torturing her and was checking to see if she was okay as soon as they laid eyes on her) didn’t make me regret taking it.  We’ve also taken two long entire family vacations since then, one to the northern Midwest in the summer of 2020 and one to New England in the summer of 2021.  Suffice it to say that our two kids are well-traveled, and we know the ins and outs of facilitating their keeping themselves entertained in the car.  It’s less that I’m a particularly brave soul than it is that I’m making the journey with two really good travelers. . . well, as long as we keep Mariah fed and her phone charged, anyway, and that’s pretty easy to do.

People love to travel for different reasons.  For me, it’s about all the things I get to see, whether I’m seeing something new to me or seeing something through new eyes when I revisit it with someone I love.  Case in point: on our trip last summer, I got to cross “Visit the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum” off my bucket list.  As a nearly lifelong baseball fan, I’d wanted to visit Cooperstown for as long as I can remember, and it was every bit as awesome as I thought it would be to see all the exhibits and memorabilia.  (Of course, the only downside is that I went a little over three months before my beloved Atlanta Braves won the 2021 World Series, which means that I naturally have to go back to see any and everything related to that victory.)  Earlier that day, we also visited Hershey’s Chocolate World, a place to which Claude and I had gone a few times before Price and Mariah were born but that we got to see through their eyes for the first time this summer.  As Hershey’s milk chocolate bars are Mariah’s not-so-guilty candy pleasure, she was absolutely entranced as we went on the Chocolate Tour ride and got an overview of Hershey history as well as the chocolate candy making process.  Honestly, we didn’t visit that many places on the New England trip that Claude and I hadn’t been, but it was a blast visiting them with the kids and gifting them with experiences and sights that we hope will stick with them for a lifetime.  (There’s also the point that when I travel with my kids, I’m hoping to develop their worldviews and deepen their visions of themselves as citizens of the world – but that’s a whole blog topic in and of itself, and I’ll save it for another day.)

For others, though, travel is about escape. . . and while that’s not an inherently bad thing, it’s not a necessarily ultimately productive thing, either.  Sometimes, a change of scenery is particularly beneficial if the scenery is wrapped up in stress and anxiety. . . a break away from it can help you clear your head and deal with it more effectively when you return.  There’s a difference, though, between seeking a temporary respite and running away from the problem, especially when you consider that problems can often pack themselves into your suitcases when you’re not looking.  In his essay Self-Reliance, Ralph Waldo Emerson said that this type of travel is a “fool’s paradise”: “I affect to be intoxicated with sights and suggestions, but I am not intoxicated. My giant goes with me wherever I go.”  It isn’t just the external baggage full of clothes and toiletries that you take with you if your plan is to run away from whatever is haunting you; it’s the internal baggage that lurks in your mind and heart, too.  There’s a reason that Gertrude Stein referred to American expatriates such as Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald as “a lost generation,” a nickname that stuck with that group of artists and writers: they weren’t able to find their peace at home in the States, and they sought it in Europe.  Of course, Hemingway and Fitzgerald sought it in many other places and means, too – and neither seemed terribly successful at finding it.  At any rate, neither one found it through their travel to Europe as both died on American soil, Fitzgerald in Hollywood in 1940 of a heart attack at 44 and Hemingway via suicide in Idaho in 1961 not long before he would have turned 62.

Travel can be an attempted physical escape from whatever it is in our lives that we’re trying to avoid facing, but escapes don’t always involve a suitcase and a plane ticket.  One of the key themes of Tennessee Williams’s play The Glass Menagerie is the theme of escape, which Tom ultimately does physically when he “follow[s] in his father’s footsteps” and “attempt[s] to find in motion what was lost in space” by leaving his mother and sister behind as he joins the Merchant Marines, but he’s been escaping the reality of becoming the reluctant breadwinner and family caretaker through endless nights at the movies, packs and packs of cigarettes smoked on their stoop, and bottles of alcohol.  His mother Amanda tries to escape her miserable present as an abandoned wife in a rundown St. Louis apartment through telling stories of her past as a well-to-do Southern belle, and his emotionally fragile sister Laura mentally escapes into the collection of glass ornaments from which the play takes its name and the records that she plays on the Victrola to avoid a world that is just too harsh for her.  Although the audience never learns what happens to Amanda and Laura, we do know that their wannabe escapes don’t make Amanda any less poor and abandoned, and they probably make Laura even more emotionally fragile  We also know that watching movies, drinking, and smoking don’t make Tom feel any better about his circumstances – and that when he does escape physically, his giant (aka his guilt over abandoning Laura) does follow him: “I tried to leave you behind me, but I was more faithful than I intended to be.  I reach for a cigarette, I cross the street, I run into the movies or a bar, I buy a drink, I speak to the nearest stranger – anything that can blow your candles out!”  Tom can run all over the world, but Laura’s candles stay lit in his conscience and in his heart. . . and he finds out the hard way that no substance or distance can resolve the deepest internal conflicts.

So if escape doesn’t work, why do people do it?  Why do they choose to avoid conflict rather than deal with it?  Well, conflict is painful, and avoiding the pain by running away from it can often seem easier.  The problem is that whatever haunts us in the first place is going to haunt us again eventually if we don’t deal with those internal demons that began to crush us in the first place.  If our relationships perpetually don’t work, if we’re perpetually unhappy in our jobs, if we perpetually feel disconnected from our churches – and we then perpetually try to change our circumstances only to find ourselves right back in the same discomfort zone that we did before our changes – then sooner or later, we have to face the fact that the problem isn’t in the relationships, the jobs, or the churches.  The problem is in us, and we have to figure out where if we’re ever going to find the peace and contentment that we keep chasing but not catching.

And how do we do that?  For me as a Christian, I’d argue that the starting point is through a relationship with God through Jesus – but I’d also argue that depending on what we’re trying to escape, we may need additional resources.  Dealing with those giants may require counseling to help us process what we’re going through. . . or even to figure out exactly what our giants are.  Whereas some people know exactly what traumas have inflicted exactly what damage but simply don’t know how to work through it, others see the damage but need help unpacking why it’s there and how to begin to repair it.  Resolving a problem is virtually impossible if you don’t know what the problem is in the first place – and just as no sane medical doctor would try to treat his/her own complex physical illness, it doesn’t make much sense for a layperson to try to treat an emotional one. 

And of course that same doctor wouldn’t say, “I have an infection in my leg.  Let me stick a bandage on it and keep going, and maybe it will go away!”  When we try to escape a problem rather than treat it, that’s exactly what we’re doing.

Dealing with our giants can mean having to admit some uncomfortable things to ourselves about ourselves.  It can mean dealing with negative feelings that we’d just as soon not face about others.  It can mean reliving and recounting a world of hurt to the point that we have to feel broken just so that we can be put back together again.  That all said, what we become on the other side of that process has the potential to be a person who doesn’t constantly feel that need to escape and/or to hide from the monsters that hide under our beds and in our hearts and minds. . . a person who feels at peace and able to be still in the quiet moments without feeling the need to panic under the weight of that something that holds us back. 

And what you may find is that you no longer have to deal with that giant that’s been following you. . . because you’ve slayed it.