I gaze out of the window at the lanes of red taillights streaming towards the hills, the city laid out in anonymous grids and quadrants, the view confirming that I was much more alone than I thought, and all those red lights inspired nothing more than a sense that I, too, should be fleeing somewhere.

The better you were able to imagine what you wanted to imagine, the farther you could flee from reality.

If I’m chasing the wrong thing, what I’m chasing will end up chasing me. And in the end, I’m less likely to be the one doing the catching.

Anger prepares us to fight and fear prepares us to flee.

The one who merely flees is not yet free. In fleeing he is still conditioned by that from which he flees.

The dark might be dark, but at least we don’t have to look at ourselves when we’re standing in it.

All the words I had prepared turned coward and fled my mind like conscripts deserting a battlefield.

I spend a tremendous amount of time carefully choosing the roles I wish to play so that I can run from the role I was born to play. And if I keep on doing that, I will eventually set foot in my grave never having set foot on the stage.

We can certainly run from a lot of things. But when we eventually pull up exhausted and entirely out of breath, we are rather shocked to discover that we haven’t been able to create any distance between ourselves and what we’ve been running from regardless of how fast we might have been running and how far we think we might have gotten.

There’s not much that I can find in places where there is nothing to find. However, to avoid facing God I find myself spending a lot of time in those very places.