Unbearable Staleness of Routine

When I was a little girl, I saw a movie that resonated with me in so many ways. 

It was about this pre-teen girl who ran away  from home with her younger brother and lived in a museum - The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. While their parents looked for them relentlessly they were the least bothered and having the most fun. Everyday they got up to wander between the most exquisite art pieces, shower in the museum fountain and attend all the walking tours. To them, it was an adventure, a break from routine, a slice of life they hadn't yet experienced. 

When asked why she did that, she said, she couldn't explain it but in not so many words, it was said to her. She did it simply thus: Because I didn't want everyday to be the same and keep on being the same. So young and she was already running from the modicum routine of life. Wait till she has to live the white picket fence life working a 9 - 5 with 2.3 children? Isn't that all of us, running from the reality of sameness?

Used to nurse that regret about adult life. I memorized that line and recited it in my head every time I felt pigeonholed into staying too long in a situation, maybe a job, a city, a relationship that was not serving me. I often found myself doing something exciting to liven up the sameness. As I move from one job to another, from an apartment to another, from one country to another, I find that, there is a search there, an unburnished thirst for satisfaction, for a blissful rest in one’s life, and that state is so elusive.  

During Covid19 and it's ripple effects of quarantine and lockdown (partial or otherwise) it's so easy to crawl into some type of sameness and before you know it you're missing the life you once had and undervalued and yearn for a return to the Sunday Brunches, Saturday Night movies at the theaters, the dinner with friends. It all goes full circle, I suppose. 

As an adult, later found out that the movie was called The Hideaways and was based on a book titled From the Mixed Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler by E.L. Konigsburg. I researched that movie and found the full version available on Youtube and starred the incomparable, Ingrid Bergman. 

It's so weird how certain statements, certain scenes from fiction resonate with you and become part of your psyche even as an adult. I feel like I am constantly in that hunt with running away from sameness, seeking adventure, and till date, I am yet to find it. Aren't we all yet to find it?