MY OWN WALKING - Journal Winterval 2024

Many bells rang with me whilst watching the film All of Us Strangers. One was a comment the central character Adam made about having become 'reconciled to living a lonely life'. I certainly held a view similar to that in the 1990's, when I was living in Diss, Norfolk. I might've be tempted to assign that view to history, as though it held no influence on how I am presently. It has, however, an air of being significant that there was still a residual relevance. 

During the mid 90's recession I was running my own art shop in Diss, and it wasn't going too well. All the effort I put into it appeared not to be resulting in any financial improvement, which was disheartening. I also wanted a relationship, but had yet to find one. After all, I'd moved from London to Norfolk, to a small conservative Norfolk market town, where there was no 'scene'. In this context being more reconciled to a solo lifestyle, perhaps then felt like a relatively sane response. Maybe it was just not the right place or time.

I was simply trying to be realistic, to save myself undue suffering by not continuing to hold out a hope for there being a life where I was not on my ownsome. As a strategy it limited emotional stress. Though it also alienated me to a degree from the truth of what I desired, by pretending I could be just hunky dory living on my own, when I clearly was not. This was a delusion I self perpetuated. But it is also one that our society encourages us to believe and follow. That our individuality is a primary need, over and above any collective relationship. 

Once I became a Buddhist, I spent a lot of time and energy opening up the psychological pits where I'd buried feelings in. Camouflaged behind noble sounding motivations, of being a person in full control of my independent destiny, a self directed lifestyle, willfully purposeful. Where 'override and move on' had become a survival mode whenever turbulent wilder emotions escaped their confinement. 

Buddhism itself is often misinterpreted on this issue. The Noble Truths states that our desires and attachments are the cause of our suffering and by ceasing those desires we can end the suffering. Though ultimately this is true, being completely submissive to your every desire is unhealthy, but so is suppressing or attempting to eradicate them. You are meant to closely observe how impermanent our desires are. Use them as means of insight via the constantly hungry nature of them, and how fleeting or elusive satisfaction can be. We have to be careful not to be premature in our renunciations.

Back in the 1990's my own premature renunciation proved not to be an effective one. Though it had a practical reasoning behind it. When you run a business on your own, you can't allow yourself to fall ill, let alone fall emotionally apart. It felt like there was neither the time nor the space for any of that. That was the frame I chose to look at it through. Meanwhile the undertow of discontent continued to rumble away.

Post that shop closing, these habits proved hard to let go of. Buddhist friends would often remind me that I was not now working on my own, I was not alone anymore. That there were other people to help, if I were to call upon them. After decades of having dealt with everything in my life myself, that way of behaving was totally hard wired. 

Unpicking habits is similar to when you go wrong in knitting a pattern. You often have to pull back many rows of intricately wrought stitch work to get to the ones that need correcting. Its slow work, can be tricky and not always completely resolved. So even to this day, much to my husbands occasional annoyance, I can still find myself slipping into operating as if I am working alone. It may be my northern upbringing plays its part, where not making yourself 'unduly beholden' to anyone was extolled. Habits often have origins that have wider and deeper roots than you remember.

I've been in a stable loving relationship for a long time now. Yet that 'lonely life' viewpoint lingers on in the recesses of my being. If I were feeling more charitable, maybe it has found another purpose after the  HA!  I have obviously been unsettled by experiencing a closer proximity to death. I sense an existential type of loneliness. Your significant other will not always be there, as likewise you won't always be there. All of our relationships, lovers, husbands, wives, partners, friends and acquaintances, might salve the basic existential loneliness and fragility of our general human condition. They do not solve it.

Certainly the experience of death appears to be a singular phenomena, even when surrounded by family, our last minutes will be experienced alone. And whatever the depth of your love and emotional attachment, no one else can ever fully know what you wiil be going through. Being separated by death from a partner you've loved and cherished for a substantial part of your life, must bring a very particular sense of loneliness to those left behind. Left alone with a solitary grief, that others might genuinely attempt to empathise with. But no one else can truly understand the specific nature of yours. That type of loneliness must cut real deep.