On January 11th, 2016, I started a daily practice of writing a joke meditation of the day called Cracked Pot Meditations. I was still recovering from the treatment of cancer, and I was having very challenging cognitive issues, so I chose just to put something simple and easy to write every day. Posting it to the blog allowed me to have some accountability. Some of those meditations were poorly written and unedited. I have gone back and begun editing these and adding an illustration, starting with the April 27th meditation. I hope you enjoy.
Meditation for June 20th
The Art of Being Alone
You’re a little weak ass monkey. You can’t stand the thought of being alone. You don’t know what being alone is. You confuse it with loneliness and think you should never feel lonely.
Guess what? Being lonely has led to every great piece of art and heart-moving music.
“Even in conversation, here in North America, we who so eagerly unpack our most private concerns before strangers dread the imaginative space that silence might open between two people or within a group. Television, obviously, abhors such silence.” – Adrienne Rich
“Not speaking and speaking are both human ways of being in the world, and there are kinds and grades of each. There is the dumb silence of slumber or apathy; the sober silence that goes with a solemn animal face; the fertile silence of awareness, pasturing the soul, whence emerge new thoughts; the alive silence of alert perception, ready to say, “This… this…”; the musical silence that accompanies absorbed activity; the silence of listening to another speak, catching the drift and helping him be clear; the noisy silence of resentment and self-recrimination, loud and subvocal speech but sullen to say it; baffled silence; the silence of peaceful accord with other persons or communion with the cosmos.” – Paul Goodman
You can’t stand the silence. When two people talk and there is a lull in conversation, we get anxious and fumble in our brains to say something, anything. We bring up weather, sports, or current events to get the conversation flowing again. What if we just sat in silence like a Quaker until there was something to say and enjoyed each other’s company in silence?
Here are the things that make it so you are never alone; therefore, always escape from the confines of your cranial cavity.
People
We crave people. We want to be around another person or a group of people. We want to be in the right group of people having the right kind of fun. We will go from friend group to friend group if it means we won’t be alone.
We get into relationships with people we don’t like because we don’t want to be alone, and the idea of a relationship burning to the ground is less scary than spending a few months not with anyone. We will settle and put up with anything to be with someone instead of no one. We will settle so we don’t lie in bed alone, fearing the approaching darkness.
We will hang out with people we don’t even like to make sure we are with people. We know they are saying terrible things behind our backs, tearing us apart critically, and judging us on everything we do, but we won’t walk away in fear of not having anything to do on a Friday night.
Being Something
Where we came from is important because it allows us to be from something. We trace our roots back to the mother country if we are European. It makes us something rather than a boring old person now, who doesn’t even represent the mother country. Americans reach for these because there is no national identity.
We won’t let go of the cities we lived in or the place of our origins. We move to other cities and talk about the city before, like God’s Jerusalem, which is hanging in heaven. We want to be known for more than just standing there with nothing but how we look. We want you to know we have a past, and we were a big deal where we came from.
We must insist that we are an integral part of our cultural group. We wear “costumes” to signify our membership. We wear band or sports team shirts so that those on the inside know that you are one of them, or to let outsiders know they are very much on the outside. For a scene born from rebelling against the norm, punks and hardcore have become the strictest on what costumes are appropriate.
We hold on to sports teams, religions, gangs, political groups, exercise styles, and anything else that will allow us to be in a group and not alone.
When we get older it has more to do with what we do for a living, where we live, who we are with, kids, cars, boats, and stuff, so our personality is what we have rather than what we are, so we spend all of our down time grinding for things that aren’t even that important.
If you don’t fit anywhere, you are alone.
Internet
When we find ourselves alone in our bedrooms, we pick up our phone or computer and look at the Internet to see what our friends are doing, what famous people are up to, and what they are saying.
We comment and like things to get a reaction. We post clear and vague things to get someone to reach out digitally: “I hate this!”, “Don’t trust anyone ever!” We keep looking for that red circle with a number to tell us someone is touching us.
If a post is posted and no one is there to see it, is it posted?
After a while, you feel empty and alone because everyone has gone to sleep, and there isn’t anything new being posted, and certainly no one is commenting or liking your posts anymore.
If it doesn’t get likes, it will disappear from everyone’s newsfeed, becoming an electronic memory.
You become more reliant on social media than on any real social situation in your social life. We thought social media was as good as a real-life community.
“Did you read what I wrote yesterday on Facebook?”
“Did you see the video of the raccoon and the cat?”
“Gawd! All the idiots and their GOT spoiler alerts!”
“I did read it! I liked it, didn’t you see?”
Time
The clock is the loneliest thing you can ever see. It is daunting to see how long it has been since you have interacted with someone, and it is worse to see how long it will be until you have another interaction.
Time slows down when you are alone and concentrate on your breath. Time speeds up when you’re freaked out about being alone. It’s like it knows you are so alone, so it speeds up towards your impending death.
You fill your days with things you must do, and you lose time to things you don’t want to be doing. You will black out because you were trying to pack as much into one day as possible. You don’t need alcohol to blackout; you need a full schedule.
Time management is the best way to enjoy being alone. Time will take everything away, but it will slow down for nothing.
Things
Books, comic books, music, TV, movies, quilting, knitting, and playing music are all escapes. Why can’t you sit and be still for a few minutes? You really can’t do it, huh? You fear your brain and thoughts so bad that a few minutes by yourself without anything going on is that scary. Got a few minutes between the next thing? Doom scroll. You’re with people, and is there a lull in conversation? Doom scroll.
That is terrible. People used to want to be alone. Poetry and art were created by loneliness. Art is going to shit because no one knows how to be alone anymore.
Go and be bored and alone and watch the inspiration rain on you.
Most excellent. And true.