I started to put together a post incorporating some of the letters I’ve written in response to columns I have been reading, mostly from the New York Times opinion section – because I don’t seem able to write without a prompt these days. Not that I don’t still have thoughts, or reflections about the events in my life and the larger world – but I seem to have lost the habit of sharing them unless I read an opinion that I either disagree with and want to counter, or that I agree with but think would benefit from enlargement. So I write letters to the writers, knowing that it is unlikely I will get a response, and equally unlikely that my comments will be published and reach an audience.
What has changed? My degree of solitude, primarily. What I felt I never had enough of before retirement and Covid (quiet, alone downtime) I now have so much of that I feel as though I’ve forgotten how to initiate a conversation. My part time work gives me what amounts to a script that I follow when I make outreach calls to engage caregivers with the NM Caregiver Coalition programs. The teaching and care coordination I do with participants also largely follow an established script, and involve more listening and giving feedback than expressing opinions or leading the conversation.
I’ve always been more of an introvert than a socializer, probably because my childhood was nearly as solitary as my daily life now. An only child in a household of the old school, where children were to be seen and not heard, and in fact seen only when a parent wished to assign a chore. Otherwise I was best protected from parental anger by spending my non-school hours in my room, usually reading. Not the sort of conditioning that teaches how to initiate conversations, reach out to build relationships, or make friends easily. Over the many years since, I have acquired some of those skills, at a basic level most commonly yielding success when my circumstances foster frequent enough interaction to grant the opportunity to get to know others, and they to get to know me.
Not, by any means, the circumstances I now function within. Working from home, living alone during the week, minimizing my time “out” in public in accord with the health and safety guidelines we are encouraged to embrace as our “normal” lifestyle for the foreseeable future… not circumstances that promote conversations and, for me at least, circumstances that instead push me back into being minimally seen and rarely heard. Easier to read, do crossword puzzles, play solitaire – the same activities that filled my childhood – than to figure out how to keep initiating conversations (via blog posts) that only rarely evolve into social interaction.
That is mind trying to sort out and understand its present state. The proper activity for me at this time, however, is not to understand, elucidate, converse or write so much as it is to accept the alone-ness of this period as right, proper, a gift to be cherished for its offering of the opportunity to simply Be. In gratitude. Moving towards enlightenment. Baraka bashad.
Tags: balance, spiritual development
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