I think this view misses the essential point of running away, which is to do it the moment the idea has occurred to you. Only an obsessional procrastinator would cry, “Let’s run for our lives, but not till Wednesday afternoon.

To want to run away is an essence of being human, it transforms any staying through the transfigurations of choice. To think about fleeing from circumstances, from a marriage, a relationship or from a work is part of the conversation itself and helps us understand the true distilled nature of our own reluctance. Strangely, we are perhaps most fully incarnated as humans, when part of us does not want to be here, or doesn’t know how to be here. Presence is only fully understood and realized through fully understanding our reluctance to show up. To understand the part of us that wants nothing to do with the full necessities of work, of relationship, of loss, of doing what is necessary, is to learn humility, to cultivate self-compassion and to sharpen that sense of humor essential to a merciful perspective of both a self and another.

I wanted to run away from everything but I wanted to run towards something too. Don't you see, dear, how it was?

Am I walking toward something I should be running away from?

"Do you ever feel like running away?"
"Of course... Sometimes I feel like I want to run away from everything."
"I remember having that feeling once when I was at the Daisy Hill Puppy Farm... I climbed over the fence, but I was still in the world!"

Why do you go away? So that you can come back. So that you can see the place you came from with new eyes and extra colors. And the people there see you differently, too. Coming back to where you started is not the same as never leaving.

"Deny it, my dear? I don't mean to deny it. Running away, in many cases, is a thing so excellent, that no philosopher would, at times, condescend to adopt any other step. All of us nations in Europe, without one exception, have shown our philosophy in that way at times. Even people, "qui ne se rendent pas," have deigned both to run and to shout, "Sauve qui peut" at odd times of sunset; though, for my part, I have no pleasure in recalling unpleasant remembrances to brave men; and yet, really, being so philosophic, they ought not to be unpleasant."

Reading is one form of escape. Running for your life is another.

It isn't running away they're afraid of. We wouldn't get far. It's those other escapes, the ones you can open in yourself, given a cutting edge.

I must run away, I must escape this very day or I shall go out of my mind.

Don't you think you're trying a little too hard to hold on to the past?

Maybe, but don't you think you're trying a little too hard to run away from it?

Not everybody's past is like yours, Aang. Some of us have to run away just to... just to live.

When a study was made a few years ago on runaway wives, what do you think was discovered to be the main reason wives ran away? It was “lack of appreciation.

Know thyself? If I knew myself, I'd run away.

I have an idea that most of all he is running away from love, because it's too big and too demanding. He's running away from us — from you, from me, from his sister, from himself, too. Who wants to be himself, who wants to be so little, and so captured and limited?