(As we always have been)
I heard about a friend’s father dying from Covid. So my friend’s alone now.
And there’s nothing new about any of that. We are all alone, and we always have been.
Company only, mostly, hopefully, makes being solitary easier. If you need your solitude easing.
But however you like to live your life – largely with company or not or any variation in between, be prepared for being alone.
xxxxxx
And yes, I will go to bed alone tonight. As I normally do. And that’s OK.
(No-one Can Escape) The Darkness Behind Your Eyes
However you live, whoever you are, you’re alone in the dark behind your eyes.
You can’t escape that you’re born alone, you’ll live alone and you’ll die alone.
Perhaps the problem lies in imagining life can be anything other than a fundamentally solitary existence. Is that bleak?
It’s obvious and ordinary, even if it’s rarely voiced, perhaps rarely faced up to. And the ordinary is often predictable, and there’s comfort in that.
Our routines, all the things we can sometimes think are just too repetitive, they are bed rock too. Comforting boredoms. The worst thing about them is how hard to break free from them when you want to – or need to.
And as a forerunner to breaking free, in the first place you have to be able to recognize they exist. And that’s hard simply because they are so familiar.
And then, if you do identify these so-familiar negative weights in your life, you have to find the energy required for the huge conscious effort needed to shake free of them.
So there we are. Here we all are. In our solitude. With our routines. Our traps. And our realities. Or, perhaps, just wheedling suspicions.
Arguably … given that being aware of one’s solitude is rarely presented as a positive, at least in Western societies, there’s a question to be asked about why that is the case. The obvious candidate is that it’s human nature to seek and relish company. That we’re pack animals. But that needs testing.
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