So I’ve been moping. Jenn is away, and the boyz are with their mother, and I’ve been hanging out at home feeling bored and lonely for most of the last week. I’ve made good use of my time: running, working, writing, cleaning, visiting with friends. But the fact is, I’ve been dragging my ass around for the last few days, feeling sorry for myself, and more often than not, making an ass of myself while I’m at it.
I don’t do well with distance, or absence, or a lot of free time on my hands. My brain is like a chemistry set, and I’m a four year old with a shit-eating grin and a devil-may-care attitude. Left alone in a room with all those beakers and funny shapes jars and colourful liquids and powders, you can be reasonably certain the fire department will have to come and sort things out.
My first tactic is to fight loneliness with cheerfulness. You know, smile at the world a la’ Mary Tyler Moore (we have similar problems). This works pretty good, actually. The girl in the grocery store gets a big hello and chit-chat about how her shift is going; the dude in the dry cleaners (wet cleaners, actually, cause its way less toxic) and I chat about shirts, and where to get a flash shirt for less coin. I greet people on the street. Its like an episode of The King of Kensington.
This all worked pretty well until I ventured into the parking lot a Wal-Mart. I had uploaded a few pictures to be printed there, you know to try and save ink on my home printer, and it was time to pick them up. This was Saturday. Mid afternoon. It was a bad idea.
I managed to keep pretty cool until some punk in a mustang slipped into the parking spot I had been waiting for the 90-year old blind man to drive his mini-van out of for five minutes. The guy just parked, and sashayed by me. I knew if I lost my cool then, it would be curtains for the day, so I silently suggested a nice warm spot for him to vacation, and what route he might take to get there, and found another spot some miles distant.
But I got back on the cheerfulness band-wagon, and smiled at as many people as I could. Some smiled back, while others avoided me like I was a plague ravaged maniac. It’s a smile, lady, not a axe….
So cheerfulness works. But what if there is nobody around to be cheerful too? That’s when my inner four year old really gets to cooking. That’s when I have to fall back on entanglement. Ironically, I’ve written about this before. More than a year ago, during a very dark time, I penned a piece called Dismantling Loneliness. The notion then - which I need to be reminded of nearly every day of my existence, it seems - is that there is no separation. Between you and I and all life around us, there is nothing separating us except our dim senses that cannot see or touch the way the world really is. It’s the, “we’re all one” argument, but with a healthy dose of scientific explanation to avoid sounding like I should be sitting cross legged, offering you my favourite crystals as proof.
The theory of entanglement, as I have also written, is that everything that has once touched is still touching, and that at the moment of the Big Bang, everything was touching. All energy, all matter, was bundled up in a little atomic ball that burst and now, even with everything spread out across the plura-verse, its all still connected.
At the quantum level, all matter is just energy and information. And this matter is made up of 99.9% empty space, so if we could see the world as it really is, we’re just concentrations of matter moving through space that is really only very slightly less dense than we are. And all of that matter – you, me, that swank shirt that I’d like to pick up – was once, and still is, connected. We’re damn near nothing at all, but what we are extraordinary, and it is all one.
Nice thought, right?
So how does it stop the kid with the chemistry set in my head from seeing what happens when you mix the red power with the clear liquid? I can imagine that I am connected with my loved ones, across town, or 954 kilometres away. But imagining isn’t really what this is all about. That’s an intellectual exercises, and it’s my intellect that is more often-than-not the problem. It’s really more about feeling it.
Running helps. This morning Josh and I ran up Jocelyn Hill. It’s a fifteen K loop that gains a whole lot of elevation. We ran it in just under two hours. But at times during that run I was very angry. I learned this morning that a friend and colleague in Vancouver has a very aggressive form of cancer. She has a teen aged son. Then Josh told me about a friend who is separated from his family in order to earn a living, and who hasn’t seen his wife and little girl for months. They have been apart for so long that the little girl now only speaks French (they are in Quebec), and this friend only speaks English, so when he calls home, he can’t understand what she is saying any longer.
The world, sometimes, isn’t a very nice place, and it isn’t fair. That anger fuelled me and propelled me up some steep hills, but I didn’t feel any closer to my kids and to Jenn. Anger separates. Fear separates. Love connects.
Its only now, as the day wanes and I am becoming still that I can feel it. Stillness of all things is what keeps the kid with the chemistry set from blowing things up. Stillness is what can connect us.
