those memories, taps into an unhealed, unresolved issue, we don’t
stop to see it objectively; we lash out at what aggravated the
problem.
Our pain can’t dictate our internal dialogue, and we can’t let
ourselves run with compulsive, involuntary thoughts. Every time we
do this, we allow that emotion to infiltrate our awareness and
transmute itself into our current experience.
We project what was
onto what is.
There’s an element of disidentification that has to happen. The
realization that what’s being experienced isn’t a matter of what’s at
hand, but just a subjective, temporary projection of whatever it is you
currently believe—in this case, that you should suffer.
Ironically though, the opposite of pain isn’t joy—it’s acceptance.
Resisting only adds more fuel to the fire. It sets you back to where
you were when you initially repressed it. It’s not dismantling the
structure; it’s strengthening it. You permit it by fighting it.
It’s hard for us to believe we deserve happiness, and so we
continually go out of our way to attract and inflict pain. That
dichotomy is natural, and it’s human, but there’s something to be
said for transcending it. If you want to think it’s impossible, you’ll only
continue to suffer because of it. If you want to keep valuing that
suffering as something that makes you more human, then so be it—
but the reality is that what makes us human is not what destroys us,
but what we build ourselves with again.
As Marcus Aurelius has said:
Choose not to be harmed, and you
won’t feel harmed. Don’t feel harmed, and you haven’t been.
78
WHAT YOU FIND
in
SOLITUDE
Loneliness is just an idea.
It is the implication that you are ever disconnected from those
around you. It’s what happens when you depend on interaction to
understand—and be okay with—yourself.
Because interaction has less to do with how other people treat you
and more to do with how you perceive yourself based on that
treatment. It’s not about how many people are actually around us, or
giving us love; it’s what that love means to us and how it alters our
mindset toward whatever it is we’re doing or focusing on.
Companionship seems like the reinforcement of oneness and
connectivity, but it is also the idea that you not only need someone
else’s presence, but their approval, their acceptance.
You can be more alone in
a crowded room and feel more
connected in complete solitude.
To the extent that we are separate beings, or to the extent that we
are aware that we are separate beings, is how “lonely” we can ever
be. Essentially: You are only as alone as you think you are.
Getting past that idea that aloneness is lonely is chiefly important
because there is something phenomenally foreign and elusive that
you find in that kind of sacred idleness. When you stop working and
start being. When you stop defining yourself by the roles you play for
other people—and for yourself. You stop seeing yourself within the
context of a society. You stop judging yourself by comparison. You
start diffusing your mindset of thinking through what would be
acceptable to others. You don’t just start to hear yourself talk, but
you realize that you are a person, hearing a mind.
And you begin to communicate with yourself in ways that are so
much deeper, more fathomable,
more understandable, than
language can ever permit. As Huxley again once said: “In spite of
language, in spite of intelligence and intuition and sympathy, one can
never really communicate anything to anybody. The essential
substance of every thought and feeling remains incommunicable,
locked up in the impenetrable strong-room of the individual soul and
body. Our life is a sentence of perpetual solitary confinement.”
This is not a bad thing, though.
It shows you who you are because you’re no longer being
someone else to someone else. You are only to yourself. You stop
behaving to fit a standard and start acting for the sake of survival, of
being alive, of humanness. You don’t realize how much of your daily
life,
how many of your rote actions, are contrived solely by the
means of being “acceptable” to the world around you, and how much
these actions that are not founded in genuineness can disconnect
you from yourself.
Solitude is the most important practice of all. It grounds you in what
is and helps you escape from what you think should be. It is both
infuriating and freeing for just that reason: It leaves you alone to see
who you are and what you do; more importantly, it leaves you alone
to see the real essence of what it is to be a person, the good, the
bad, the downright odd and ugly. It
leaves you no choice but to
contemplate the bigger picture, the underlying reasoning, the way
things are.
The only time we see the whole structure clearly is when we step
away from it.
