Alone

I wrote this today. Skipped last week because it was too busy in the lab, had several 48-hour days. Which led to some time being alone just doing the work. I wrote this and hoped that it will be read several times in various different personal conditions. Perhaps it will resonate differently each time.

Alone

Being alone has quite an alluring quality isn`t it? It allows you to be only with yourself. Away from other people`s opinions and misunderstandings. Far from those who judge our thoughts and actions. Further from the consequences that follows anything that we do. Being alone is so pleasantly calming and intoxicatingly addictive. Being able to tell other people that we feel lonely. That no one can connect with us, no one fully understands us. I mean, how can they? They went through different things in their life, absorbed different experiences and reactions. Perhaps even the colors that we see are not the same because our brains interpret colors in such a personal way that we have no way of knowing that the color blue you see is the same as the color blue that I see. Telling others how lonely I feel is so much less frustrating than realizing that perhaps it is impossible to make other people understand what it is that you are going through.

Is it even possible to be not alone? Most of us only have one consciousness in our brains. The theories that there are two of us, each one centers in each hemisphere of our brain, but mixed inseparably that it becomes one consciousness. Even after listening, people can never really synchronize the emotional chemical poisons that activates during the recalling of that particular topic. Even our biology makes it easier to be alone than to be with others. Fight or Flight they say, is the basic response of all living things when faced with an adverse situation or an adversary in opinion. It is always fight the adversary’s opinions or fly away from the adversary. Our basic instinct is to be lonely in our opinions, and never to fight that basic instinct to something more complex like listening, understanding, withholding judgement or co existing. Furthermore, on top of this biological imperative to be alone, we build even more borders around us to be more alone.

Being alone is so much safer. Questioning myself is so much easier than questioning others. At least questioning myself I can receive an answer that I know is the truth for myself. If there is someone else out there receiving the same question, how can I know that they answer truthfully? Based on what is true instead of what other people think of them. How can I possibly know that in a different space or a different time, their answer would change so drastically? How can I possibly feel safe when that answer was given in an attempt to lure me over to their truth and not the truth. Which leads to the philosophical debate of what is true. See how complicated it becomes? Being alone is so much better.

However, being alone… is lonely. It could be enjoyable, so we think, why don`t we invite people to understand this perspective of loneliness. We group up in our small little groups of interest and beliefs. We feel better when we are around other people of a similar mind and so we become protective of it. Nevertheless, this feeling is selfish, it makes me feel better to be around them and so I protect this feeling of less loneliness by creating thicker borders. Inadvertently creating a bubble of individual pseudo-connected consciousness that thinks it means well by trying to include other people into the bubble as long as the cause of their loneliness is the same. But even in that bubble, each of those consciousness went through different things before and during the formation of the connection that leads to a small voice in the deepest corners of their minds saying that these other people misunderstood what they are really going through because of some small or big variable of differences in each of their life. Some people in the bubble might even imply that some other consciousness misunderstood their own thoughts and shape it up based on their own truth.

The various bubbles of pseudo-connected consciousness form up and have to face the fact that other things happen outside of that bubble. Among those, will the same things invoke similar emotions in you?  Could it be something of the total opposite? How is it possible, that something that made me so sad and depressed makes you feel energized and obligated to share? How is it that something that happens in this world be viewed from so many different angles and from each angle rises such strong support that breaks that bubble and even make the effort to break other bubbles, into smaller little pieces that seem impossible to be brought together again.

It is so difficult to go around and listen to people. Not just hear their voice, but also be immersed in their entire emotional and intelligence spectrum. It is difficult, neigh impossible to listen to someone and disagree, and at all cost withheld the urge to convert them to what I perceive as the truth. Because being alone in our own way even in our thoughts are so deliciously appetizing. We have to identify all the differences that there is and mention how our difference is the most special of them all and make these other people be as different as you are. In which if we succeed, we included yet another person into our bubble of pseudo-connected consciousness or stay alone and blame others for misunderstanding us or even misunderstanding themselves. Moreover, when one of us fail or refuse to do so, we shun them away from our current bubble of pseudo-connected consciousness. We truly do go out of our way to stay lonely.

Being alone is so alluringly enjoyable. We can blame ourselves more freely. For not being able to explain ourselves, better. For the failure of understanding better of what we read, learnt, or heard. For being uneducated or falsely misguided in our studies. Being alone allows me to look deep into myself and see how incompetent I am in all that I do. I fail every day in changing what can be changed or understanding what can`t be changed. I am incapable of fully understanding why other people fail to understand those that they perceive as others. It is much easier to be alone and blame myself for my ignorance, naiveté and willingness to question those things that I cannot fully understand. Being alone is easier when I blame myself when I fail to understand that people may have different lifestyles and may have valuable emotions and belief systems and that it is okay for that to exists as long as it endangers no one else in their own little pseudo-connected bubbles that they worked painstakingly hard to build.

I wish more people are OK with being alone once in a while. Not all the time. Just sometimes.