I love the passing of time
I love being by myself. There is no place I would rather be than alone. I almost don’t even care where it is, as long as there’s nobody else around.
I wouldn’t mind being in London again, though.
Lindsay took that picture because obviously I was busy taking a picture of myself in Trafalgar Square.
I don’t mind having my cat around, though I am at my happiest with nobody else near me, even an animal with very few demands on my time and attention like Emmitt. Knowing that I have something to take care of, even if it’s a cat who also likes to be alone, keeps me just on the wrong edge of complete relaxation. It’s a wonder I can sleep with this animal on me.
Having largely worked from home this year, I would never call that alone. I have coworkers and bosses and clients and people whose jobs rely on me doing mine, which means they need a way to contact me. Even the loose tether of an email keeps me from feeling completely alone. Zoom calls and Slack channels eliminate solitude entirely.
The only time I am completely alone, and utterly unavailable for almost any contact of any kind, is the 30 minutes I spend every year inside an MRI machine. The only person who can communicate with me is sitting in a room nearby. They tell me when the machine is going to start its clamoring. It’s very loud. I have to remain completely still during the process, because the machine is taking a picture of the inside of my brain. I have a perfect record of never moving once during my MRI. I am extremely good at not moving.
I know a lot of people find this experience upsetting, but not me. Like a little rabbit wedged into his little den, I am content, even with the noise.
This subject has taken on fresh significance to me today because Tom Hanks said solitaire was a waste of time.
When I first saw the headline, I thought it was going to be about how you shouldn’t waste time doing leisure activities that have no value beyond their entertainment value, an argument I am used to hearing. That wasn’t exactly what he was saying, as he surprises us at the end of his essay with a line about playing cribbage instead, because that was something he played with his son.
So he wasn’t saying “don’t waste time” he was saying “if you’re going to waste time, don’t do it alone,” which I think is also bad advice.
I am hostile to arguments against both leisure time and doing nothing, both of which I find extremely enriching and defend against all comers. I’ve heard it from success monsters who see all time spent not pursuing a goal to be a waste. I’ve also heard it in the Lake Woebegone old time wisdom like we get from our Tom Hankses and suchlike.
It’s perfectly okay to waste time and accomplish nothing completely by yourself, because being alive, simply breathing and taking up space, is a shattering rebuke of the darkness. Life is a delicate, precarious tightrope. It is valuable and precious beyond any measure. Every thought, even the tiny thud of “I’m thirsty,” is a fanatical celebration of quantum improbability. The simple, passive experience of any of our senses is a riot of chaotic yet coherent chemical reactions that, individually, are no more complex than a spark of static on your sock but collectively create symphonies in our heads. I find it impossible to consider a living, thinking, being as anything less than a precious miracle.
I didn’t expect to rhapsodize about the preciousness of human life but it’s all wrapped up together for me whenever people talk about wasting time, or suggesting that anything could be a waste of time. Nothing is a waste of time. In fact, if I were to ask you what you’re doing and you said “wasting time” you are probably actually doing something pretty remarkable. I would define remarkable as literally anything.
A rolling stone gathers no moss, unfortunately.
The saying I invoke above implies that gathering moss is a bad thing. But I think a rock with moss on it is magnitudes more interesting and more beautiful than one without it. I submit that if we were rocks, moss growing on us would be something to aspire to. Look at these rocks with moss on them. Gorgeous!
Loneliness is not Solitude
Anyway, back to my point: I love being alone. It is perfectly possible to be alone and yet not lonely. I wrote before about the loneliest man in the world, and I’ve also written about how being alone both delights and depresses me, on alternate days. I’m not unique. I’m sure this happens to everyone.
For every quiet evening spent with a book or just with the patterns of cracks on the ceiling of my bedroom, and the meandering tributaries and capillaries of little thoughts and diversions, I have nights where I wish that I was sharing that space with somebody else. I crave intimacy, the kind you get when you are completely yourself with someone else who is being completely themselves.
Being alone and being quiet are my favorite pastimes, and they don’t much lend themselves to expanding beyond the frontiers of familiar feelings.
I’m not worried about it. Life is a gift, even the life I spend by myself, and I won’t squander it. I fully intend to spend the rest of the night doing exactly nothing of any worth, with nobody else but my cat.
A memory I can’t get out of my head
I’ve had this memory in my mind for most of my life. I return to it when certain moods hit me. It’s a memory of something that never happened. It’s a collection of sensations and images that stabilized into a specific tableau.
A sparsely-furnished house, a bedroom, a woman in a dress standing at the window, a breeze blows past her with the smell of something floral, maybe the outside air, maybe a fragrance she’s wearing. The feeling this makes in me is peace, ease. I’ve found my place.
It ends there. It’s like a painting made out of feelings.
I include this sidebar purely as a counterpoint to the solitude thing. I am happy being alone, but I find myself emerging from the pandemic, however slowly, as a person who wants to share his space, if only for a moment or two.