Alone, Together

They say that those who live outside the parameters of society know something about it that others don't. I'm not sure I buy it anymore.

I've spent the last few years in remote work—freelancing alone, joining remote teams, now teaching remote courses. I keep thinking I'll find the angle that makes it work. I haven't.

This week I started reading about Chinese recluse poets from the 5th and 6th century. It's fine. You don't need to check in on me.

I found them through David Budbill, an American poet who built a house on a Vermont mountainside in 1969 because he thought society was about to collapse. He wrote simple poems in plain language:

It's me and then it's not me. I am and then I won't be.

Budbill is one in a long line of bald white men who discover Zen Buddhism and decide to tell the rest of the world how to live. But I kept reading around these poets anyway—Matsuo Bashō, Han Shan, Kamo no Chōmei. There was something there I recognized.

The thing is, I crave solitude when I'm around people. Then when I'm alone, I want company. The balance is never right. The line between solitude and loneliness is thinner than I'd like.

Paul Tillich wrote that "language has created the word loneliness to express the pain of being alone, and the word solitude to express the glory of being alone." But I think Melanie Klein got closer to what I'm feeling.

Klein described loneliness not just as wanting love from others, but as searching for "an unattainable perfect internal state"—a sense of wholeness. She believed it was unattainable because it was based on something we lost in childhood: the experience of being understood without needing words.

That's what I'm looking for (maybe we all are?). To be accepted without explanation.

Remote work promised freedom from office politics, from performative presence, from having to explain myself. Instead it just gave me more time alone with the fact that I swing between wanting people and wanting to be left alone, never landing anywhere comfortable.

Budbill again:

I'm glad to see our friends come
talk, laughter, food, wine.
I'm glad to see our friends go
solitude, emptiness, gardens, autumn wind.

Maybe that's all there is—the swaying back and forth. Not a problem to solve but a rhythm to accept.