I Wasn’t Running From Anything When I Moved From the States to France

While I thought of moving to France at 68 as starting a new chapter, my first thought when difficulties arise has always been to run

California highway (photos by author)

It’s been more than a decade since I moved from the US to France. Over the years, I’ve thought about my decision, wondered at times about my motivation. I was 68, not exactly young; was I trying to outrun the realities of ageing, proving to myself that by embarking on this adventure I could hold back, or at least slow down the clock?

If that idea was there, it was buried deep in my subconscious. I thought then, as I think now, that I just wanted to try living in France — a dream I’d long nurtured and, at last, the time seemed right.

Yet throughout my life and still right now, my first impulse in the face of adversity, of obstacles, disappointment, of things not working out is to literally escape — to somehow outrun the pain of what’s happening

It’s been nearly two years now since my friend Kit’s husband, Jerry, died. As I tried to help her through those early months of grief, I remember fighting the urge to suggest that she get away for a while.

It’s exactly what I did after my second husband died of a brain aneurysm just after his 40th birthday. Overwhelmed with shock, I loaded up the car and with my daughter, a teenager at the time, drove from California to visit my sister in Missouri. We’d barely crossed the state line before I realised that there was no escape; grief was along for the ride.

Yet the message of no escape hadn’t really sunk in. My reaction to a shaky third marriage was to hole up in a boat, miles from the daily domestic dramas. Ultimately it solved nothing, just kicked the can of marital problems further down the road until it was obvious that things were irrevocably broken.

If I were still living in the States, reading ever more startling and depressing news of what feels like the systematic destruction of democracy, I know I’d be plotting my move to France — an escape this time, rather than a quest for adventure.

InThe Wisdom of No Escape: How to Love Yourself and Your World, Buddhist nun, Pema Chodron, writes, “There’s a common misunderstanding among all the human beings who have ever been born on the earth that the best way to live is to try to avoid pain and just try to get comfortable.” She continues, “We think of discomfort in any form — disappointment, embarrassment, irritation, anger, fear — as bad news and try all kinds of ways to escape.”

Over the years, I’ve dipped a lot into Chodron’s work, mostly passages from When Things Fall Apart. I brought the book with me to France because I suspected the new life I had in mind for myself could quite easily fall apart and, if it did, I’d need a bit of Pema wisdom. I did turn to it to get through a couple of rough patches early on, but, happily, it never entirely fell apart.

Or at least I never really felt that it had until a few years later after returning to France from a trip back to the States to see family. It seemed at the time this was exactly what was happening. My journal entry:

I am sitting at the laptop crying, Googling feeling alone and helpless. The car wouldn’t start with jumper cables, someone from the garage was supposed to come by, but I sat outside for a couple of hours yesterday waiting and he never turned up so the car still isn’t running and I’ve no idea what’s wrong with it. If it needs a new starter, that’s one more expense I can’t afford.

Now the phone seems to be on the blink. It won’t charge so I have no phone service and somehow, somewhere, the contents of my wallet — credit, debit, French health card, have all disappeared. I’ve turned the place upside down looking for them.

And a mouse just ran across the floor.

And I’m wheezing and scratching and need more stuff from the pharmacy, but the carte vitale is missing. I feel at the end of my rope, don’t know whether it’s the stress of the trip, money issues or what, but — if it weren’t for Ginny’s kindness, bringing up food etc., I don’t know what I’d do.

The irony of that moment, was that my preferred means to run from pain by physically escaping were not available to me — no car, no money, no credit cards — no option but to stay with what was happening.Exactly the thing I’d always resisted and exactly what Chodron urges when life delivers a bunch of stuff you’d prefer to live without. Don’t bail. Instead of running, learn from the pain.

“Things falling apart is a kind of testing and also a kind of healing, she writes. “We think that the point is to pass the test, or to overcome the problem, but the truth is that things don’t really get solved. They come together and they fall apart. They come together again and they fall apart again. The healing comes from letting there to room for all this to happen: room for grief, for relief, for misery, for joy.”

It’s not easy though to just be with whatever is happening, to not seek solutions, to not try to fix things. Even knowing it won’t work, it’s hard to resist the urge to run from what feels like the source of a problem.

But as I’ve discovered for myself, and as Chodron writes: “If we run a hundred miles an hour to the other end of the continent in order to get away from the obstacle, we find the very same problem waiting for us when we arrive.”

Idon’t think I was running from anything when I moved from the US to France, but at 80, I’m aware that the lesson of no escape is still one I’m in the process of trying to fully accept.