On Solitude: Reach Out and Touch Faith
There was something I couldn’t quite shake off.
The impetuosity. The constant rumination. The underlying anxiety of existence. Very mild, like a pot of warm unboiled water but you know it’s there. The lack of patience. Better, stronger and I want it quicker. As if no matter how neatly I have tucked my shirt in my pants, there’s always this tiny selvedge showing up. The same drive which has fueled me to land in various new destinations on my own, which has set me apart from others yet blatantly exposed my naivete and recklessness.
Once I casually mentioned to a girl I just met that being wasted is not really an option for me because I’m the only one who can make sure I get home safely so I tend to party soberly. On our next party together, she let me get wasted. And it has been a long time since I felt okay about being careless. Alone in a foreign land. She got me home and there were some parts of the night I don’t remember. Sometimes you don’t need people telling you to take care of yourself because you already knew that; sometimes you need people doing so without saying a word. Like the way she led me to the taxi without saying a word because I was the one who was being wasted and kept asking a lot of questions.
“Why are we going home?” That’s one of the few moments in life I can shake them off.
I’ve been practising my morning yoga and meditation routine for more than a year. Without any specific goal, I just want to know what would happen. When it comes to meditation, you can only say “you’re trying to meditate” as this is a state of mind you’re trying to reach and it’s not guaranteed every time. I used to be terrified of people who talk about spirituality all the time; I still am. Yet there’s something valuable about these two exercises that provide you with a good chance to observe yourself. Without having to attend too many lessons, my yoga teacher already noticed I’m a person who cannot wait. She told me, “you need to learn how to leave it blank.”
No, I lied. The truth is everything you’ve done provides you with a good chance to observe yourself. Leave it blank. That’s one of the few things I’m not particularly good at.
Hardly recall exactly how but I’ve learned from a very early age that people are pretty much the same. Probably it was because of the various languages we speak which drew a perfect distance between us. Without knowing exactly what they’re saying, I watched the way they talk. The way they move their hands when they talk. The way they turn their heads. The way they drink. The way they shake or don’t shake their hands. The way they walk. The way they talk with their family. The way they eat their food. The way they argue. The way they laugh. The way they express themselves. When you’ve observed long enough, it’s very easy to come to the conclusion that we’re way more similar than we think we are. The differences we see, I would like to refer to it as “preferences” which are the preferences we develop due to different environments we’ve been brought up by different people. That’s all. No more, no less.
In essence, we are the same. We want what we consider good things. We want to be better. We want to live a better life and all of that are vary depending on what you’ve been told what’s “good”. When our bellies are full, eyes are smiling and we are surrounded by the people we trust, that’s the moment I like the most. I’ve been trying to see people as the way they are wherever I go, trying to distinguish what are the labels and the guards and to touch them with their souls. It’s not so straightforward but just like any other skills, it requires practice. It didn’t take me long to realize that this is a very important quality to have: willing to see people as the way they are. Once you can do that, life seems to be clearer.
What we don’t know is that to see yourself with such clarity, we need a lifetime to practise. Or even more complicated than that, sometimes we don’t want to see ourselves with such clarity so as not to see something we don’t like.
That’s a lot of rumination. Better to go get wasted.
The opposite of naivete, of recklessness, is to learn how to harness the flaws. Good or bad. High or low. In order to harness ourselves, we need to be willing to see with clarity, to see something we don’t like. We need to go further, go alone, go deeper, go darker, go painfully, go guardlessly. Go to the edge of your mind because how can you see yourself as the way you are when you haven’t seen the whole picture? In life, sometimes you end up being someone you didn’t intend to be and that’s okay. Sometimes you need to surf your recklessness as if you’re on top of a wave. After the fall, you get up and surf again. Because at the end of the day, maybe we just need to make one choice. To shake them off or to harness them. But first of all, you have to see that it’s there.
