Meditation for June 20th, 2016
The Art of Being Alone
You’re a little weak ass monkey. You can’t stand the thought of being alone. You don’t know what being alone is. You confuse it for lonely and you think you have a right to never feel lonely.
Guess what? Being lonely has lead to every great piece of art and heart moving music ever made.
“Even in conversation, here in North America, we who so eagerly unpack our most private concerns before strangers dread the imaginative space that silence might open between two people or within a group. Television, obviously, abhors such silence.” – Adrienne Rich
“Not speaking and speaking are both human ways of being in the world, and there are kinds and grades of each. There is the dumb silence of slumber or apathy; the sober silence that goes with a solemn animal face; the fertile silence of awareness, pasturing the soul, whence emerge new thoughts; the alive silence of alert perception, ready to say, “This… this…”; the musical silence that accompanies absorbed activity; the silence of listening to another speak, catching the drift and helping him be clear; the noisy silence of resentment and self-recrimination, loud and subvocal speech but sullen to say it; baffled silence; the silence of peaceful accord with other persons or communion with the cosmos.” – Paul Goodman
You can’t stand the silence. When two people talk and there is a lull in conversation, we get anxious and fumble in our brains to say something – anything. We bring up weather and sports or current events just to get the conversation juices flowing again. What if we just sat in silence like a Quaker until there really was something to say and enjoy each other’s company in silence?
Here are the things that make it so you are never alone, therefore always escaped from inside the confines of your cranial cavity.
People
We crave people. We want to be around another person or a group of people. We want to be in the right group of people having the right kind of fun. We will go from friend group to friend group if it’ll mean we won’t be alone.
We get into relationships with people we don’t like because we don’t want to be alone and the idea of a relationship burning to the ground is less scary than spending a few months not with anyone. We will settle and put up with anything just to be with someone instead of no one.
We will hang out with people we don’t even like just to make sure we are with people. We know that they are talking terrible things behind our backs, tearing us apart critically and judging us on everything we do, but we won’t walk away in fear of not having anything to do on a Friday night.
Being Something
We find where we came from is so important because it allows us to be from something. We trace back our roots to the mother country. It makes us something rather than a boring old person now who doesn’t even represent the mother country. Americans reach for these because there is no national identity.
We won’t let go of cities we lived in or the place of our origins. We move to other cities and talk about the city before like it is God’s Jerusalem hanging in heaven. We want to be known for more than just standing there with nothing but the way we look. We want you to know we have a past and where we came from we were a big deal.
We are defensive to all these assholes telling us how big of a deal they were in the town they just moved from, and we have to let them know that in our town they mean shit. We tell them that this city was cool before they got here and ruined everything. We talk about what was on each block as if it is a fantasy book map.
We hold on to sport teams, religions, gangs, political groups, exercise styles and anything else that will allow us to be in a group and not alone.
If you don’t fit anywhere, you are alone.
Internet
When we do find ourselves alone in our bedrooms we pick up our phone or our computer and look at the internet and see what all of our friends are doing or what famous people are up to and what they are saying.
We comment and like things so we can get a reaction. We post things that are clear and vague to get someone to reach out in digital form. We keep looking for that red circle with a number in it to let us know that someone is touching us.
If a post is posted and no one is there to see it, is it actually posted?
After awhile you feel empty and alone because everyone went to sleep and there isn’t anything new being posted and certainly no one is commenting or liking your posts anymore.
If it doesn’t get likes anymore it will disappear from everyone’s newsfeed and then it becomes nothing but an electronic memory.
You become more reliant on Social Media than any kind of real social situation for your social life.
“Did you read what I wrote yesterday on Facebook?”
“Did you see the video of the raccoon and the cat?”
“Gawd! All the idiots and their GOT spoiler alerts!”
“I did read it! I liked it, didn’t you see?”
Time
The clock is the loneliest thing you can ever see. Seeing how much time it has been since you have had any kind of interaction with someone is daunting. Seeing how much time it will be till you have another interaction is worse.
Time slows down when you are alone and you just concentrate on your breath. Time speeds up when you’re freaked out about being alone.
You fill your days heavy with things you have to do and you find yourself losing time to things you don’t really want to be doing. You will actually black out because you were trying to pack as much into one day as you possibly can. You don’t need alcohol to blackout; you just need a full schedule.
Time management is the best way to enjoy being alone. Time will take everything away, but it will slow down for nothing.
Things
Books, comic books, music, TV, movies, quilting, knitting, playing music are all escapes. Why can’t you just sit and be still for a few minutes? You really can’t do it, huh? You fear your brain and thoughts that bad that a few minutes by yourself without anything going on is that scary.
That is terrible. People used to want to be alone. Poetry and art was created by loneliness. Art is going to shit because no one knows how to be alone anymore.
Most excellent. And true.