My last day off. This was an abbreviated vacay, sort of. Someone else would have planned a trip, or arranged a get-together of friends. I isolated, and broke a lens. But it is not the way you think. Isolating appears to arise from a negative motivation. But for me it is exactly what I wanted for these days off—I think. Except for the lens. Inasmuch as one can be sure of any motivation, I am sure that my motivation to isolate was not negative. I wanted the break to be a relief from my anxieties with daily human interaction. But I am beginning to think that I don’t really know what I want. They say that we humans came here to connect with other humans. I don’t want to do that, at least not anymore. So, does that mean I need therapy? Am I supposed to want to connect with others? Is not wanting to connect a problem in itself, apart from failing to connect?
Maybe if my job did not pit me against the worst of human nature, then I would be social-butterflying. As it is, I will be back in the throes of dysfunction tomorrow. Maybe if I were retired—or unemployed and homeless, or disabled and institutionalized—and had nothing but isolation to look forward to, then I would pine for contact. Maybe I truly do not know what I want. Maybe I am, in fact, pining desperately for contact, and am just using work-a-day miseries to divert my attention from the aching void within.
How many ways are there to lose sight? I’ve heard that everything is illusion, that we see what we expect to see, that reality is a figment of our imagination, or lack thereof. Opening our minds to see what we do not want to see, or to believe what we would not have expected in our wildest dreams to be real, that could be the path to awareness. If this is all illusion, then what am I missing? What do I not see? I mean, anything could be real, anything possible. What stories am I missing? What lives could I be living? What worlds without end?
And do I really care? That is the only necessary question. Maybe we did not come here to connect with each other. Maybe we are here to either succumb to the illusion of our own isolation, or to vigorously pursue the elusive reality that we have always been completely connected.
So, what is the way back from this oblivion? Where does one plant the first footstep on the journey to real? The answer to that begins with, and follows from, a fascination with what might be. Simple curiosity can get me started on the road to find out. But I am in love with the illusion, and at the first steep trail, or dark wood, I come back to it. I can’t count how many times I have started that trip. And the leaving and returning happens in such rapid succession that the two are indistinct. There is no clear moment of liberation, nor an awareness of defeat. Just a continuous circular dullness. There appears to be no direction out. But what else might there be?
Pick anything. Anything at all.