Is everyone simple like me? I know that it can be a dangerous trap to fall into thinking that everyone is like us. The average of one million and a negative million is zero, just as is the average of one and minus one or a single ten and ten negative ones. Is everyone else like me in simply wondering if everyone else is like them?
For most of my life I was simply a risk minimization machine….do what is safe, period. What I studied, my relationship to sex and drugs and rock and roll, who I dated, the friends I made, my aversion to going fast, everything. Then as I worked year after year to manage that compulsion better I transitioned into a connection machine. I wanted to connect. I bet if I added it up I found at least half a dozen former strangers in Europe that I had known for under a week on my recent trip that I ended up hugging. Yesterday I hugged a tree. I did. I am a tree hugger.
I think I was doing this for quite a while largely as a new more effective way to manage anxiety but now it is a full contact sport. It is what I do. I seek connection, to people of all ages, to myself, to you out there in the ether, to customer support people in far flung countries, to dogs and babies and trees and to quiet streets themselves in their daily golden hour. Are others like this? As with everything else I have no answers, partially because I’m just me and partially because there really are no answers (are there even questions?) Does our search for answers construct the questions themselves….rising from the dust to assemble into the mirage before us to be blown away and re-self-assemble elsewhere at else-times?
I spend a lot of time thinking. Often not effectively. Sometimes it is more worrying, replaying, or ruminating. But the only respite I really get is when I work to shut-up my glorious monkey brain. Glorious because though it can cause pain and suffering it is mine for now. I forget when the library wants it back. Hopefully it will auto-renew.
Am I alone? I think that is really something we all wonder about. Maybe this exploration is a useful proxy for the meaning of life. But after we do all this thinking and wandering and wondering and assembling propane grills and battling receding hairlines we stop. If we are fortunate and disciplined enough or (maybe lucky enough?) we can make the switch to a human being from our current human doing. In these brief blinks we are. We connect and melt into the fabric of existence racing outward at the speed of light in all directions. All of it. We are one. In that way I guess we are all simple like me, (and not).
