Everyone on this bus is my child

Photo By Subharnab Majumdar - Flickr: Gazing beyond the camera, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=30128047

I'm looking across the aisle to a young blond woman. She wears headphones, an olive green raincoat and tan suede pants with zippers on the ankles. Her shoulder length hair looks like it was cut about a month ago, and it curves forward in a golden arc as it falls to just about her shoulders. She looks tired.

In this moment she is my daughter.

I see her scared and afraid, wandering like a child. She is confused but reconstructing... Constantly creating a new story to replace the ones her parents told her as she fell asleep in those early nights. She is all of us... Searching... Waiting... Doing as she thinks she should. Trained. Molded. Shaped by a culture she did not choose.

Or maybe it's just me. As I look around the bus I see people of all biological ages. There is even three month old baby pouched on its mother's chest beside me to my left. There are people in their sixties with liver spots on their heads. But all I see is children.

All I see is children because I know that deep inside there is no switch to adulthood. Adulthood is a game we are all roped into playing one way or another, lest we be sent to a severe timeout... Thrown to the dogs. But I wonder as I look out at all these tired children's eyes... What depth of spirit had to sacrifice itself so that the "adult" could live?

What quantity of children's blood fuels this machine?

We Are All Just Walking Each Other Home

The clock is ticking.

Moments unfold, your tale told.

You: the tale teller.

---

Post from 7 Days Ago: What Defines You?

Being a Happy Loner

Today I did something that everyone does from time to time: ask Google what's wrong with me. My symptoms? Contentment in being alone. The answer that I found made me incredibly happy.

I am a loner.

What is a loner?

A loner is that person who either avoids human interaction or just doesn't seek it out.

Why would a person choose that life?

Possibly just because it's what that person likes, or because the person is shy, religious in some way, or mystical. The person might also just have a personal philosophy that doesn't jive with other people's personal philosophies. (And don't forget: we all have one.) Loners might also seek solitude to avoid the pain and anxiety of social interaction. But the bottom line is: a loner is habitually alone.

If you are feeling sorry for the person being described, you are probably not meant to be a loner.

When I found the Wikipedia article on loners, I was overjoyed.

When did I become a loner?

I became a loner in January, 2015 while I was taking a metal casting class. At the time, I was dating someone who wasn't good for me. To avoid the stress of being around her, I isolated myself in the foundry, working 10 to 12 hours every day on my art. When I wasn't making art in the foundry, I painted in my room.

While at first I was seeking solitude to avoid my girlfriend, the habit lasted longer than my relationship with her. In spending so much time alone, I discovered that solitude had amazing healing powers.

For the second semester of my senior year, I spent more quality time alone than I ever had before in my life. I discovered that I could spend entire days or weekends alone and not feel like I had missed anything. And now, almost a year later, I still feel content to be myself by myself.

What does solitude do for me?

Pacing. We all have different heartbeats, and nobody pressures anyone to make their heart beat faster. Why then do we allow ourselves to feel pressured to work faster or be more productive than we know is good for us? Solitude allows me to live at my own pace, by my own rules, in relative serenity.

Quiet. When there is no one else, the volume knob of life is between my fingers.

Peace. To be alone is to be free from the drama that haunts people's everyday lives. While I can still support my friends over the phone, I am safely removed from the suffering by physical distance. As for any emotional problems I have, each of them is an opportunity to practice some more independent self-care.

Unity. They say you are the average of the five people you spend the most time with. That's absolutely correct, and in spending more time with myself, I become more like myself. That's a great thing.

If this seems like vain navel-gazing to you, you're correct. According to an old book I used to read, "All is vanity." Whether you're looking inward at your navel to please yourself, or outward at other people's navels to please them, or even upward to please God's holy navel, it's all vain navel-gazing.

Let that sink in.

Does solitude have drawbacks?

Yes. On a very practical level, you start to lose habits that were ingrained in you pretty early like combing your hair or wearing deodorant. Then, on going out with friends after being alone for a while, you have to remind yourself to do things that you maybe did automatically for 22 years of your life. However, this "drawback" also comes with the added bonus of being far less concerned with little things like how one's hair looks.

One drawback for social people attempting to be loners would obviously be the lack of people, but for happy loners this is not the case. I am fortunate to have good friends to phone every once in a while. Those interactions are perfect for loners like me because they allow loners to continue being alone while at the same time spending time with another person. All of the benefits of friendship, with all the convenience of solitude. I should write commercials.

Are you a loner?

Are you a part of the anti-tribe? Do you feel like you have something to bond over with a bunch of people who are OK never meeting you? Now that you know that loners are a thing, do you finally feel like you belong? Even though you don't?

Tell me what it's like for you to be alone (acuddlediva@gmail.com).

A Three-Step Guide to Being Free from Your Emotional Life

Emotions are like mosquitoes. There really is no reason why they exist except to annoy us. That's why I've decided to tell you the secret to unleashing your potential as a rational human being.

In this short post, I'm going to give you a foolproof plan for separating yourself from the world of your emotions. It's not easy, but the reward is worth it: a peaceful, meaningless, gray existence where nothing matters and nothing touches your heart.

(1) Believe that you can stop feeling something, if you want to.

Meditation is a great way to condition yourself to believe this. By subscribing to the tenets of Buddhist ideology, you can alter the way that you interpret your own emotional life. If you get really good at it, you can stop feeling controlled by your emotions. They might still control your behavior, but you will have totally numbed yourself to their influence that you perceive yourself to be totally free---enlightened, even. And that's what we're aiming for: a numbness to emotion that we can justify to ourselves as an advantage.

(2) Believe that emotions only last as long as you feel them.

Thanks to our rational faculties, this one is not too hard to believe. It's intuitive, after all; our lives consist largely of our conscious experiences; therefore, if we're not feeling sad, how could we have sadness? The goal of believing that emotions are transient things that pass with their conscious appearance is twofold: one, we feel a sense of release from our emotions, which makes us feel free and powerful (and who doesn't want that?); second, we gain the conviction that we can ignore our emotions entirely, because they will be different tomorrow.

Depressed? Don't worry about it. You might feel happy tomorrow.

Anxious? Probably doesn't matter. Just ignore it.

This way, we can make decisions based on reasons alone, unfettered by the fickleness of the heart.

(3) Believe that emotions can't affect your behavior if you deny them.

Man, would it be terribly inconvenient if emotions controlled us even if we channeled all our rational powers and plowed through them. Imagine a world where racist prejudices prevented you from befriending people of other backgrounds even though you don't believe that you are a racist. That would throw a wrench into your sense of autonomy like nothing else. In order to feel like you're in control of your life, it's essential---ESSENTIAL---to think that denying your emotions actually blocks them from having an effect on your behavior. 

Now it's your turn! Time to say goodbye to emotions.

My advice to everyone out there who struggles with emotions is just to cut yourself off from them. Maybe you will do things that you don't quite understand and you will feel like a walking corpse, but at least you won't be burdened by uncomfortable feelings.

Good luck!

Love the One You're With

I want to start off by saying that, when I post abstract questions about the meaning of life or make generalizations so broad that you could land an entire planet on them, I am not doing it because I think that I have figured out life. Even less so am I doing it to teach you something. First of all, I do not have life figured out. Even if I am right about something, it is a complete accident, and I didn't mean it. (Please forgive me.) Second of all, if you can learn anything from me, I believe you are smart enough to learn it without me masquerading as an authority. After all, Nature, my best teacher, never tries to teach me anything, and yet I learn so much every time I take a walk in the woods.

Now that I have removed any suspicion of my knowing something, I will tell you what I know. Today, in this fraction of time, I know what I have known several times in the past, and I know it strongly: I only have one life. That is the truth that vibrates under my skin today like a sweet, crunchy chord pulsed in heavy four-four time on a noble black Steinway.

Knowing the singleness of my life is overwhelming to me. It terrifies me. It makes me feel small. It amplifies the passage of every second into the crash of a wave of the great cosmic ocean. It is paralyzing. It is beautiful in a way that breaks my heart and inspires me to do great things, and, at the same time, it is humbling in a way that makes me content to do what I can. It is a cold, white, starlit knowledge projected on the asphalt of an empty street. It is the warm, black knowledge of the deepest caverns of the earth, which sing silent songs that echo for all time.

Knowing that there is one, and that there will always only be one, reminds me of something people say about relationships: "Love the one you're with." In the one life that I have, I come into contact with various people every day, in passing or with purpose. But the one person I never leave, my truest friend and my most toxic nemesis, is me. Only living one life means that I only get to be one person; I don't get a second chance if this one doesn't work out, or if I get tired of being me. I have to live with me forever, until I turn into dirt. I can't take a break, and I can't quit. And when I think about the fact of the oneness of my life, and I think about loving the one I'm with, I feel that the way I need to live my life is fairly clear to me. I need to take myself on, the good with all the bad, give myself a big hug, forgive me my sins, and love myself until the day I die.

Maybe I have figured out something about life. I don't know. I don't like to presume. If I do, it doesn't mean I know anything about your life, or about the way you should live your life. But while I don't know anything about your life, I do hope that it includes this message of love. Life is really too short to spend it giving yourself anything less.

Related: I do not believe in love.

Did you know that today is never going to happen again?

I woke up today as I normally do, feeling like I got hit by a truck. I slept in another hour, got up, stumbled downstairs, gulped my coffee, made myself some curry, and answered emails during breakfast. I worked for three hours, and then I walked to the coffee shop to work some more. I walked home, ate dinner, and then worked for the next four hours. There was a phone call with a friend somewhere in all of this. In ten minutes, I will go to bed.

As mundane as it all seems, the truth is that this day is now completely, utterly gone, never to repeat itself, and never to exist again.

Every day of my life is like this, I realize. No matter what I do or what I learn or who I see or how I feel, there is that one constant: that the day that happens is unique. It is unique in the sense that it alone is happening, while all other days have either ceased to happen or have not yet begun to happen. Every day is the only day, and the contents of that day belong to that day and that day only.

Reality is exclusive.

Realizing that every day is unique, unprecedented, and unrepeatable is not just some esoteric insight. It is a practical, useful truth.

Since every day is unique, boredom is the result of inattention.

If I find that on any given day I am bored, feeling like every day is exactly the same and that my life is not interesting, all this means is that I have stopped paying attention to my life. It means I have grown comfortable to a fault, numbed to my environment, deeply complacent and dying in a waking sleep. In other words, if it is true that every day is impossibly and irreconcilably unique, then boredom is an illusion.

This also means that boredom is not a problem in itself.

Boredom is a symptom, not an illness. The illness is a chronic inability to recognize the novel beauty in the mundane, a deficiency that necessarily prevents a person from feeling thrilled or pleased or intrigued in more than a shallow sense. We seek endless new experiences to fill the void. The next hit show on Netflix. The next travel destination. Whatever. Something new, that's the answer. Only for a little while...shallow novelty is like caffeine...the spirit builds up a resistance...more and more is needed...until eventually nothing works.

Relieving the symptom of boredom takes renewed, sustained attention.

If you find that your life is boring and unsatisfying, the problem is not your life. It's your attitude.

It is a fact that there is only one day happening at a time.

It is a fact that no two days are identical.

A million tiny things set each day apart from the next. You just have to learn how to spot them. Once you attune yourself to these tiny things, you become fascinated by your own life.

Every day becomes the most interesting day of your life so far.

Untitled

There will always be a part of me
That thinks the better part of me
Is worse
And there will always be of me a part
Deep inside the aching quaking walls of my heart
That hurts
There will always be the bloodied cross
That casts long shadows, dimming gold to dross
To dross
And there will always be my ghostly Jesus
My jealous former lover Jesus
Following my steps
And lurking
Lurking
Watching
Judging
Crushing
Holding
Self-denying
Choking
Suffocating
Killing
All the things I love the most
The most
The most.