The Short Version

I was making a cup of coffee this morning when I found that my brain had slipped into an old familiar routine: having imaginary conversations with people who aren’t present. On the one hand, it may be useful to mentally practice conversational skills, especially if I expect to be in the company of a real person in the near future, but when I find myself having fantasy chats with Oprah, Barack, et. al., it’s time to consider whether my mental resources might be put to better use.

Having nipped this particular conversation in the bud, I started thinking about a strategy that I came up with years ago when I first discovered this kind of habitual behavior. I would say to myself, “There’s no one here but you.” But this morning I realized that that particular strategy was flawed in that it reinforced the idea of my self as an ongoing entity that could be alone or not.

If the social self is seen as an ongoing, constant, reality—as who I really am—then when it finds itself in the kitchen with no one else around it may trigger the feeling of loneliness. This is not a pleasant feeling, and it can motivate going out to find some other lonely human being to keep the social self company.

But the social self is not the only self that’s capable of taking over my brain. There are other selves that are totally content to be puttering around by themselves: watering the plants, reading, listening to music, playing with the computer, etc.

Loneliness is not the only option this brain has when it is physically alone, and all it has to do to escape loneliness is to activate one of its non-lonely selves. Having imaginary conversations is not conducive to remembering those other options.

So how might I better spend my time than chatting with people who aren’t here?

What happened this morning was that all conversation disappeared for a while. I became the actions that my body was performing, the sensory inputs it was processing: hands and arms moving dishes from the drainer to the shelf, body pivoting, bare feet on the floor, counter top, refrigerator, gurgling of the coffee pot… A stream of sensations that weren’t being experienced by “Norm”—this organism’s brain-constructed social identity—but that occurred without reference to any overriding entity.

There is a delectable sense of freedom that comes with this untethered flow of sensation. In contrast, conventional experience seems to happen inside a box, constrained by the bonds of language with its concepts and definitions.

Of course, as I’ve said, we can’t live in a social world without language, but it is possible, I think, with practice, to be aware that it is only a tool; to pick it up and use it only when needed. Like any tool, a certain level of maintenance is required–a little sharpening and lubrication, perhaps–but it needn’t be a constant preoccupation.

There is more to life than social encounters, and we don’t have to give up the joy and freedom of that life just to be ready for our next conversation.

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(Click the title below this image to watch the movie.)

Just This

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Sunday’s adventure began when I got on the bus on my way to a San Francisco Symphony concert in Dolores Park. There was a guy sitting behind me with what seemed like a mild case of cerebral palsy, loudly describing the devastation of the ’89 earthquake to an elderly woman in front of me, who didn’t seem particularly interested but was humoring him. My initial reaction was irritation at the intrusive loudness, but then I remembered the transformation that has been coming over me recently, and the irritation became affection.

This transformation has been building for a couple of years or so, but so intermittently that I hadn’t noticed its trajectory until a new neighbor moved in upstairs. I can hear her footsteps on the floor above me, interspersed with the odd thump now and then. She’s not that heavy-footed, but her steps are audible, and being somewhat hyper-sensitive to sounds of human activity in my vicinity—a result of my particular history—I notice. She’s a very busy person, and I wonder, abstractly, what is it that she’s so busy doing. What could possibly warrant all that moving about?

I find myself smiling, chuckling even, thinking, “There she goes again. She certainly is busy.” I feel a warm sense of affection for this human being that I know so little about.

Perhaps because I hear her so frequently, and experience this warm, fuzzy feeling so frequently, that it has become more readily available. Now I find that when my next-door neighbor has a “music day,” and cranks up his stereo, I feel the same smiling affection that I get with the overhead footsteps. Noticing the music is not new, but while I once neutrally accepted it, now it brings a smile. The same is true when I hear the rumble of my downstairs neighbor’s sliding open her closet door. Every moment of awareness of other people seems to bring a new dose of joy.

Back on the bus, the guy behind me has become quiet since his audience got off, and the new focus of my attention is the two early-teen boys with skateboards sitting across from me. I haven’t listened closely enough to hear what they’re talking about, but their excitement and amusement are coming through loud and clear, with “fuck!” and “shit!” punctuating their talking and laughing. I have the idea that their lack of parental supervision is making them profanely giddy, and I’m giddy with their giddiness.

Next, a gorgeous young woman puts her bike on the rack at the front of the bus and sits down with her back to me. She’s dressed for summer, and on the back of her bare neck and shoulders are a couple of random squiggles from a ballpoint pen, as if she might have been holding one while scratching an itch. Again, loving warmth sweeps over me, at what? Her basic humanness? Her vulnerability?

It was a warm day for San Francisco, sunny and fog-free, and the park was packed. I had come mainly to hear Beethoven’s fifth symphony, rather than for a social experience, but I could not avoid social distractions. The human high point was watching a teenage girl devour a huge submarine sandwich a few feet in front of me, often munching with her mouth open, leaning against the back of her mother’s low canvas chair and facing me instead of the orchestra. She seemed oblivious to the music, and to the sandwich as well, flipping the pages of a fashion magazine while her surging metabolism fed itself.

This affection for humanity is arising more frequently, it seems, but it isn’t altogether new. A few years ago I pulled up to an intersection behind a guy on a Harley. Waiting for the light, he put his boots down on the pavement, stood up, lit a cigarette, and surveyed his domain before sitting back down and roaring off into the wide world, king of it all. I grinned, enjoying his supremacy with him.

When I told Howie about it, his first remark was, “Right out of central casting,” which he followed with pointing out how the attitude inherent in such a public persona inevitably leads to suffering. There is a separation of oneself from the rest of the world, a posing before the audience, that will likely lead to a feeling of isolation, and to desolation when age and infirmity make the pose no longer sustainable. I agreed, but that doesn’t mean we can’t vicariously enjoy the feeling of that moment.

Delusion is an unavoidable part of being human–it is built into the organism. The limitations of consciousness mean that we can never experience the truth of what we are. Like the inhabitants of Plato’s cave, we can only guess at the nature of the real world, and yet we go on, making the best of life that we can given our limited information.

Knowing that we are inherently, unavoidably deluded offers the possible relief of humor. We can learn to laugh at our pretensions and our bumbling. The most malevolent among us are in the same situation as the saints: we are all made what we are by the circumstances of our lives. We are all equally deserving of love and compassion.

There is a kind of tangential connection between all I’ve just written and the video that’s available below. In the long run, as the song says, what seems bad at the moment may turn out to have wonderful consequences. One of our great limitations is that we can’t foresee how the interplay of myriad circumstances will shape the future, and so, as always, we act on limited information; doing what seems right at the moment, hoping for the best.

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In the Long Run from Norman Bearrentine on Vimeo.

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