Are You Running From Safety?

Finding Hope in a Big Mess

The human inclination to seek safety is not so much a predisposition as a compulsion, a cloying desire for the familiar embrace of certainty.

It’s as if we’re perpetually teetering on the edge of chaos, akin to a tightrope walker glancing anxiously at the abyss below. 

Yet, paradoxically, it’s in the messiness, in the reckless leap into the unknown, that hope is found. And few things lay this truth bare with the same poetic inevitability as running – running not toward safety, but away from it.

The words alone, Running from Safety, speak to something elemental. Safety, after all, is the padded cell we construct for ourselves, the cushion of routine, the predictable monotony that lulls us into thinking we’re living, when we’re merely existing. 

To run from safety is to rip up the contract of comfort we sign with our fears. It is to embrace the bruising reality of living, with all its risks, uncertainties, and breathtaking rewards.

Running is the perfect metaphor. The act itself is so achingly primal – feet pounding against earth, lungs burning with effort, a wild, kinetic sermon to the human spirit. 

To run is to leave something behind, perhaps safety itself. But what do we find in the slipstream of movement, when the safety net is abandoned, and the wind mocks us with its indifference? 

The answer is both nothing and everything. We find space. We find silence. And, if we’re lucky, we find ourselves.

The Beautiful Mess

But running from safety isn’t simply about literal movement. It’s a state of mind, an existential decision to meet the mess of life head-on. Mess, after all, is where life happens. The neatness we crave is a sterile mirage, a dismal utopia where nothing unexpected ever disrupts the peace.

Yet, the mess – the breakup, the job loss, the unsolvable arguments, the dashed dreams – these are the fertile grounds where hope takes root.

Hope, unlike safety, requires an acknowledgment of disorder. It’s the scrappy underdog of emotions, insisting on blooming in the cracks of despair. It is not the same as optimism, that saccharine cousin who chirps platitudes from the sidelines. 

No, hope is gritty, defiant, and gloriously unreasonable. And it is in the running, in the rebellion against stagnation, that hope makes its home.

Writing as a Lifeline

If running from safety is about movement, then writing is the stillness that allows us to understand the journey. Writing lets us hold onto something lost – not in a desperate clutching of the past but in a transformative act of resurrection. 

When life descends into chaos, when the mess becomes unbearable, writing offers a fragile lifeline.

Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way arrived like a well-meaning but insistent aunt, barging in uninvited just as I was teetering on the edge of creative bankruptcy. It sat me down, took my hand, and, in the sort of soothing-yet-firm tone usually reserved for interventionists and midwives, told me to get a grip. It was, in short, exactly what I needed, exactly when I needed it.

To write is to salvage meaning from the wreckage. It is a bold act of defiance, a way of saying, “This mattered. I mattered.” Writing doesn’t bring back what was lost, not really. But it lets you pin down a fragment, like capturing a butterfly that’s already flown. 

In this way, writing is both elegy and celebration. It lets you hold onto the ache, the joy, the thing that slipped through your fingers but left its mark on your soul.

For those who run from safety, the pen becomes a running partner, a co-conspirator in the rebellion against forgetting. Every word scratched onto paper is a reminder that the mess, the heartbreak, the wild and unruly journey was real. And in remembering, there is power.

Where are you heading?

The thing about running from safety is that you don’t always know where you’re going. That’s the point, really. It’s not about the destination but the act of movement itself. 

Hope doesn’t come gift-wrapped at the end of the race; it sneaks up on you in the strangest places. It’s in the rhythm of your breath, the absurdity of an unexpected laugh, the fleeting moments when the world feels expansive and kind.

In running, you discover that safety was never the goal. Safety is the consolation prize, the thing we cling to when we’ve lost sight of what truly matters. 

Hope, on the other hand, is audacious. It demands that we keep running, keep writing, keep living in the glorious, bewildering mess of it all.

In the words of author Raynor Winn: “Hope. It’s powerful; hope can change things.  But you’ve got to put yourself in the way of it, let yourself feel it.  Let the power of hope lift you up. Do that and anything can happen.”

To run from safety is to live with courage, to invite chaos into your carefully ordered life and find beauty in its relentless unpredictability. It’s not an easy choice, nor is it one without scars. 

But in the end, it is the only choice that truly matters. Because in the mess – in the running, the writing, the losing, and the finding – is where we discover hope, waiting patiently to take our hand.

So, lace up your shoes, pick up your pen, and step into the unknown. The world is teetering on the edge of an economic and political blender set to ‘obliterate,’ and yet we persist in our obsession with safety – helmets, disclaimers, bubble-wrapped existence.

But really, what’s the point? Security is a fairy tale we tell ourselves to keep the night terrors at bay. The truth is, chaos is coming, and maybe – just maybe – that’s where life gets interesting.

Safety is overrated

I’ve watched, with the same morbid fascination one reserves for slow-motion car crashes, friends – good, bright, hopeful people – who have spent decades chasing this mythical chimera they call “security”, that cruel, dangling, never-to-be-reached carrot. Dutifully, like plodding, well-shod carthorses, they’ve trotted forward, day after day, year after year, convinced that if they just keep marching, keep swallowing their dreams like bad medicine, they’ll arrive at some promised land of peace and certainty.

Instead, they become cogs. Not even interesting cogs – cogs in a machine that doesn’t notice them, that will grind them down and replace them without a flicker of sentiment. And the worst bit? They know. Oh, they know. You can see it in their eyes, that dull, glassy resignation. The vibrancy – the bright-eyed curiosity, the thirst for adventure, the untamed wonder of youth – has been bartered away for trinkets and pensions, for routine and reassurance, for an existence so safe it is indistinguishable from waiting to die.

And now, as the horizon of their lives rushes closer, the great, cruel trick reveals itself: there was never any security. It was never coming. Life, in its full, messy, chaotic, exhilarating, catastrophic glory, was the only thing ever on offer. But they traded it away. And for what? A comfortable seat on a train going nowhere?

So, let me tell you the one thing worth knowing: security is a fairytale. It does not exist. What does exist is this moment, right now, and the immutable, roaring, insistent call of your own soul. If you’re not careful, you’ll silence it so thoroughly it will forget how to speak. But if you let it loose – if you set it free to flutter and flit like a butterfly in a wild, blooming meadow – it will lead you places you never imagined, to joy you never thought possible.

Tragedy will come. Accidents will happen. You will suffer, and one day, you will die. But don’t let that be all you do. Choose, while you are still breathing, to actually live.

Graeme Dinnen

ResourcesForLife.net