Koan of the Feet
January 5th, 2010“Honey, people vote with their feet.”
Of all the over my head, what good does that do me platitudes I heard as a child, the number one head scratcher was, without a doubt, my father’s all purpose brush off. “Honey, people vote with their feet.”
I was about eight years old when he first tried this riddle out on me. Who knows what difficulty I’d come to him with…I was a socially tone-deaf child, and both took and gave offense countless times everyday. Someone had wronged me, of that I can be sure, and I was seeking justice from whoever would listen.
“Honey, people vote with their feet.” Clearly, my father believed this to be the answer to my problem; as far as I was concerned, however, it was the most unintelligible thing anyone had ever said to me. Voting with your feet was expressly and universally prohibited in my eight year old world, otherwise I would have Toe Shoes and Nancy Drew and Mashed Potatoes with Gravy ALL DAY LONG.
Quickly enough, though, I came to believe my father was saying it was my own fault if I was unhappy, or someone was mad at me. A double whammy to be both the culprit and therefor a disappointment to the person in the world I most adored.
As with many things we wish we could avoid, his words grew to have an unanticipated influence on my philosophy of life, evolving into advice I touted to my friends as we all flailed our way through our 20s. When a boyfriend disappointed, when a boss reacted, when any little thing tripped us up, it was, “Honey, people vote with their feet.”
Now that I have crossed my fair share of thresholds, I understand what he meant to say. Even if we don’t like a situation, if we stay in it, we are admitting that we get something out of it. When we don’t like it enough, we leave. I’m not saying I buy this premise; just that his point of view is clear. For my father, life was full of anchors, weighing him down only until he was ready to move on. But I think my world is made of roots, that penetrate and reach out and most importantly, allow me to breathe.