The Escape Chair

Why and How We Might Shield Ourselves from Relentless Persuasion

On the tiny front porch of our house is a single chair that overlooks our front yard. Most school mornings, still in my robe, I tip-toe outside and sit in it for five minutes while the kids holler at each other about missing socks. I inhale just a bit of outside air before they notice I have disappeared, then I open the door and dive back in to sign reading logs... and locate jackets... and plead for the brushing of teeth.

This summer, I have spent hours in the chair, reading a book or dozing off or, most often, just looking at nothing. The air in South Carolina is heavy in summer; it cushions me as I stare out over the yard, lulling me into a kind of trance.

Once a week or so, the reverie is interrupted when a kid stumbles out of the front door, looking spent. “I’ve been looking everywhere for you!” they exclaim, out of breath and offended, either by my subterfuge or my radical, momentary unavailability.

I’ve taken to calling this little spot the Escape Chair.

the Escape Chair

I suppose I come by it honestly. My dad has always had what he calls a Cogitation Station, a designated place to sit and think. When I was growing up, he never struck me as a Sitter or a Thinker, but maybe that was because he was sneaking out like I am now, perching on a dock or deer stand with a fishing pole or rifle across his knee.

My dad visited when we were first looking at this piece of land to build on. Walking the property, he inquired as to the location of my future Cogitation Station. I rolled my eyes, laughing. “I’m gonna have to think on that,” I told him, no place in mind.

I suppose I’ve found it after all.

Since we built this house on what was, for about a year, a swath of red clay, nearly every natural thing I can see from the Escape Chair is something I selected, or planted, or have tended to. Come to think of it, I selected the bricks, the paint color, the cedar, the lantern. I tend to it all.

I always harbored a vague pity for my parents, raving about their swelling hydrangeas or the pink shock of bougainvillea hugging our mailbox. But these days, I catch my thoughts wandering for ten minutes onto just the success of the canna lily bulbs I planted, how well they fill up that space and how much interest the dramatic explosion of purple lends to the otherwise green and brown landscape. The magnificent red blooms, like scarlet flames at the tip of a purple candle, that last only a single day! I think old-people-thoughts like, “I am so pleased.”

The dog always sits with me, looking out, admiring. Also pleased.

I find the canna lilies gratifying, embarrassingly so, but I likewise reflect on the failure of the pansies and the star jasmine I’d hoped would wind its way around the lantern post. The plants themselves aren’t the point, and neither is my variable level of pleasure in them. The things I notice are filler, places for the mind to go when I have given it nothing else to do. I notice the magnolias growing behind the basketball goal only because, in my hours in this chair, I’ve trained myself to. There is, after all, nothing else to observe but maybe the rhythmic thwap of a baseball as it spins around the batting trainer, or the blur of a kid on a bike, flying dangerously fast down the steep driveway.

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Our world is a mess, no? I remember a few years ago when it was still possible to deny that. I think the assassination attempt makes denial tough for even the most devoted optimist. The response to this latest assault on our bastions of individuality is, of course, noise: conjecture, hand-wringing, side-taking, exaggerated lament. I have long thought Americans incapable of a dignified response to any challenge; self-satisfied noise is all our pop-culture, buy-everything training has equipped us with. We might choose bravery, or the hard kind of love. We might choose reform. But we don’t know how to do those things. Instead we choose sound and fury, signifying nothing.

So, I sit in my chair. I might just as well be looking at any ol’ thing: a bug, a mailbox, a wind chime, a rock. There is something pure about studying an object incapable of acting on me. The Escape Chair becomes the place—maybe the only place—where I am entirely shielded from influence.

We are virtually always in the grip of forces either persuasive (advertising, punditry, op-eds, hashtags), deadening (TikTok, porn, alcohol, YouTube, video games, television), or both. The world is acting on us—riling us up, shoving us down, numbing us out. We barely acknowledge this and do little to resist.

I once had a therapist tell me to go home and stare at a tree. I was mad at her—real things were going wrong in my life, and I needed real solutions—but I did it. I still remember the shape of the leaves on that particular tree, and I can call to mind the precise way they shook in that day’s wind.

Simone Veil said, “absolute attention is prayer.” It presupposes love, she said.

If this is true, we mostly pray to our iPhones. To our televisions. To the combined cacophony of social media chatter, the voices released into the ether with the least forethought who, therefore, least deserve our devotion.

Mostly, in the “age of indulgence,” what we love is dopamine.¹ Being influenced feels better than being bored.

A few weeks ago, when I turned on my car, the radio had been mysteriously dialed to the conservative political talk station. I considered it a cosmic nudge to listen, to hear what was being said by the right-wing radicals I usually try to avoid. For a week, I didn’t flip to Spotify, to my own podcasts and playlists. Whenever I was in the car, I just listened.

At first, I was hopeful I’d gain insight into an unfamiliar way of thinking. But the talk radio hosts are hateful. They spew words like God and morality while making fun not of Gretchen Whitmer’s policies but of her supposedly botoxed forehead. I don’t care about Gretchen Whitmer one way or the other, but the tone is undeniably sanctimonious and endlessly self-congratulatory. These people (like their extreme leftist counterparts) choose the most exaggerated representation of the thing they hate and argue not with Reality but with that fictitious exaggeration. These extremists exist in a world of their own making.

And yet. After just a few days, I could finish their sentences. I could even feel my own emotions syncing up with theirs. I could imagine the dopamine rush I’d experience if I traded complexity for that kind of belonging. Self-righteous rage is clear as water and just as refreshing, too.

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Esther Lightcap Meek says, “We love in order to know.”

She means a different kind of knowing than the amassing of information. She means wisdom.

To get wisdom, she says, we have to offer something.

Ugh. Talk radio, TikTok, Amazon—it allows us exclusively to take. We are properly set up for a lifelong binge, our existence an eternal sinking-in to a welcoming sofa. Why look up?

At first, it feels boring to sit with things that cannot act on me. When I make sacred the absence of influence, that boredom—the rigorous shielding of oneself from persuasion—begins to feel good.

It’s tempting to dismiss this practice as a luxury. We’d rather claim we have no time for sitting in chairs; it makes us feel important.

That’s the influence talking.

When we don’t study the actual world, we forget what is Reality. We are too quick to believe in the world the talk radio goon has created for us. That world is threatening, and we could perhaps be forgiven for thinking crude, caveman tribalism is our only recourse.

a post shared in my Facebook feed this week

The actual world, while undeniably a mess, is at least fifty percent miraculous. This morning, riding on a bike trail with my twins, I was encased on either side by trees that allowed only flecks of dappled sunlight onto our path. It was a thousand degrees and my son whined for an hour that his knees hurt, but all I could think was, “Isn’t there something worth saving here, in these United States?” Look around. I mean, Good Lord. Isn’t there a whole lot worth saving?

At the café on the bike trail, we sat slicked in sweat and ate bison jerky and drank a peach smoothie. My barely eight-year-old daughter removed her bike helmet and shook her sweaty blond head like a wet dog. We exchanged the twins’ summer reading certificates for free brownies, and they picked off the gourmet salt sprinkled on top. Isn’t there a whole lot worth saving?

When we shift our orientation from gathering knowledge—from taking what we want—to loving what we encounter, engaging it as a gift, the world repays us.

The canna lily pleases us. We are pleased by the rock, the bike path, the sunlight.

visitor to our front yard last week

I fear we will find ourselves on the burned and broken end of a bloody disaster before we remember how lucky we are, just to be alive, here. I fear we won’t remember the shadowy bike path until it’s gone. I am as guilty of this as anyone.

We can’t think only of what’s wrong “out there,” in our discordant digital spaces and on our airwaves of psychological torture. We have to also remind ourselves what’s worth saving, right up close. Only the physical world itself—in all its brokenness and misery and beauty—can reject fear. Can reject noise. Can engage us as we truly are.

In my Escape Chair, the seductive razzle-dazzle of public rhetoric gives way to the silence of the thing itself—what we might call Reality.

Reality does not seduce. It can neither argue nor agree with me. It will neither affirm my opinion nor prove me wrong. It is, inexplicably, as pleasing in its failure (the pansies) as in its triumph (the lilies). In contrast to a world’s worth of misinformation, it is the mere quality of realness that is satisfying, even if the realest thing we can behold on any given day is a blade of grass.

Here is the magic: The blade of grass does not beckon or beg; it does not long to influence. The blade of grass just waits, indifferent to me. It pleases me not because it tries to but because, by caring nothing about me, it offers a refuge from the torrent of persuasion.

1. Anne Lembke, Dopamine Nation.