Alone

I just read a friend's essay on being born alone and dying alone. His thoughts seemed to be... cerebral.

What's "alone"? We add so much to these thin words. At one moment I can feel alone and lonely, isolated, disconnected, unvalued, uncared for, unloved, the solitude a reminder of many lonesome days and nights, a prediction of many to come. In another moment I can feel alone and content, part of a family, a work team, a neighborhood, friends, extended family, my neighborhood, my congregation, the wider neighborhood in which I take walks, the people I regularly meet while walking the dog, the people I see at parks, my city, fellow bank, restaurant, theatre and store customers and workers, associates of the workers in all these places, citizens of my state, my country, my planet, a part of the web of life and matter, even an active part of creation or the creator. What's the difference between one such moment and the other? We call this "feeling" lonely or connected, yet none of this is really a feeling, a sensation or perception. It's all just a mind-trip, yet the projection of our trip onto our senses and emotions is so real that we think "loneliness" is real, that it even exists outside of ourselves...

A friend of mine died last year. He was 94. He was ready to die and be with "his people." Like your grandmother said about "going home." If we live long enough, we outlive most or all of the grandparents and parents and older cousins and siblings and even some of the younger ones. We have so much experience of people leaving and reappearing (whether we visit them or they "return" to us) that the aging mind thinks when death happens to us, as it did to them, we'll be reunited. I don't think he was particularly alone or lonely during the day, but he looked forward to much more connection in death.

It's all a mind trip. We can see it with edge-experience notions, like death, god, playing the lottery or holding the wrong political opinions, but it's hard to see regarding our own notions. We take it for granted that the floor's beneath us, when the truth is that we have a complex belief system about it that we no longer see (till the floor boards or thin ice breaks). You probably are aware of some of your cynicism-- the same kind of views that give rise to interpreting dying alone as being lonely. The depth of these cynical thoughts is amazing... It was amazing that you imagined a fetus, surrounded by living, breathing, talking, walking, interacting mother on all sides, as being alone. I thought the common view was that it's the loss of that constant contact and the first feel of separation, the cold, sense-depriving, ghostly unfeeling of air that first gives newborns the feeling of separation. And then being swaddled and reunited with the mother assuages that upset...

Those experiences are unknown, pre-language, forgotten except in the shape of the foundations of our brains, yearning closeness, warmth and touch, fearing separation. Later, we meld those into language and create a "reality" around it. It makes sense that we can also believe in magic, unicorns and tooth fairies. They too, can quicken our pulse and inspire adrenaline into our arteries, giving us real sensations to attribute to their reality...

Perhaps when others are around we constantly tune into them and so are drawn to the more real common experience, distracted from the world of our own thoughts. When we're alone we easily slip into own thoughts, especially negative ones, and the world of those thoughts can take us over.

Copyright 2010, Randy Strauss, All Rights Reserved.