Alone Together

How does it feel to exist?

How does it feel to share that feeling with the trees and the mountains?

A friend came with me to the SF zen center and the above question was a prompt given to us. It started a discussion of what that feeling is.

It’s a feeling that has been on my mind lately, mostly because it seems to come from seemingly different places.

Maybe I’d describe it as the way you feel when it’s dusk and you’re sitting in a chair outside, enjoying the moment with nothing to do. Or how you feel looking at the moon and the stars.

It’s a deep connectedness feeling, maybe it’s just love, but a very non-direct love. A love that you can feel for inanimate objects like mountains, trees, but also for people.

In some ways, it feels different than the normal love in that it feels like it holds all of us. It has no pulling or pushing in it.

I get it from people too, but not directly. Rarely from conversations.

Like when you’re in a foreign country and you can’t understand the language, but you get to see a beautiful scene of people living their lives. You don’t have enough information to categorize them, or to know if you agree or disagree with what they’re saying. There are no edges to it; it’s just life.

It’s confusing to me because I sometime want to connect with more people because I want more of this feeling. But just adding more people doesn’t increase it. A lot of times, it decreases it. It’s weird to feel more “connectedness” when you’re alone.

I almost feel it more with people I don’t know. A short conversation with someone in line, or at a cafe. For some reason these short interactions feel more poignant. A person I’ll never see again, sharing an experience with me.

Sometimes I exchange contact info with these people and I wonder- would this be more meaningful if we didn’t? Like that small sliver of their life is enough to love them by. Any more and we’re down in the realm of differences and google calendars and expectations.

I do feel it with the people I know, but it sometimes requires a bit of space. Like thinking about that person later on after you’ve talked to them that day. When you can hold them as a separate person without any actions nearby.

The connectedness feeling seems to come behind the words. It’s like an acknowledgement of a shared experience.

Sometimes I see it in someones eyes, when the eye contact lingers a fraction of a second longer. “I see you, no really, I do”. Like their gaze is communicating something that words can’t.

I feel it for the person who collects cans out of my recycling the night before garbage day. I put all my cans in one bag now and leave it at the top of the bin.

I felt it for an older woman who I shared an elevator moment with, her explaining she knew the hospital layout all too well, while I was trying to find my route. Radiology, she said, that’s one place I haven’t been. That’s good, I said. We walked silently together down the hallway until we went to our separate futures. (My CT scan was fine).

This feeling doesn’t require anything. It doesn’t even require happiness. Although I think it provides a certain type of joy. A joy that on some level, I’m not always ready for.

I still feel it when I’m sad. In fact, I might feel it more when I’m sad. Or when I’m sad for someone else.

I feel it when things don’t happen the way I want them to. That’s a confusing one.

Although The Wind - Izumi Shikibu

Like when life really makes a hard turn in the other direction, and you’re kind of stunned. When you’re forced to see that you don’t control everything, and that the path you made up in your head was fabricated.

In this way, it makes “good” and “bad” lose some of their meaning.

I feel it when I’m writing. I’m not sure if it’s because of the nonspecific connection to whoever might be reading this (you). Or maybe no audience is needed; it just occurs by way of giving room for the inward to come outwards.

It’s a feeling I used to be scared of. I’m not sure why. It felt uncontrollable, unsafe. Well, I’m still scared of it sometimes, but less.

I don’t know how to end this and now it sounds so dumb. ←This is where I left off the first time I tried writing this.

I really summoned up that feeling of not wanting to feel it. It does sound dumb in some ways. It doesn’t have any hard science to hide behind.

I will venture back into it, with some hesitancy. Why are we scared of this feeling? When I was a teenager, it really became inaccessible to me. I think it opened up a bit when I made an internet weird-friend who was into philosophy, and we debated stupid things incessantly.

I remember abandoning it entirely when I decided all that stuff didn’t really matter at all, and that what did matter was starting companies and making money. (I’m mediocre at both, and neither made me happy).

I think many of my pursuits were done with the motivation of “if I can do ____ , then that will be enough, and I can forget about the rest of life”. How safe that can feel- it can be addicting, to feel like you can narrow down life to one metric, and just solve that one thing.

That lasted a good 15 years of my life. It just slowly evaporated, I’m not sure why. I guess because it didn’t work.

Towards the beginning of this evaporation, I went to Big Sur for a few days of nature gazing and no cell connection. This feeling of awe mixed with fear set in, and it didn’t go away until I left.

I didn’t want that feeling then, but now it’s starting to leak in.