Archive: Opinions

"You have too much time on your hands."

This from the service writer of my auto repair shop. I had stopped there while noting the unusual emptiness of the parking lot, indicating that although auto repair was deemed an essential business, people were obviously driving less, thus repairs were either postponed, unless necessary or not affordable.

The sign on the door asked me to call instead of visit, but I was already there. The open sign remained lit, so I had gone in to arrange a state inspection appointment.

I had mentally devised a humorous scenario involving a 21st century cave painting, hunter gatherers, and toilet paper. Her reaction to my reciting this imaginary scenario was a searching stare in the rye, but not unfriendly, "You have too much time on your hands."

My attempt at humor had fallen flat and I recognize that humor is probably failing these days as we listen, perhaps a bit lonely, for the other or next shoe to drop in this deepening saga of the unknown. And I ponder this new solitude of social distance and new definitions of 'alone'. We are alone no matter the exclamations of being in this "together."

I have developed a new film friend these days -- of all places in the laundromat. Those of us who are utilizing laundromats are thanking higher power and the Governor that laundromats are also considered essential. Well, they are.

The new friend is younger than I but she seems somewhat or perhaps what some have called an old soul. We talk and share thoughts and stories six feet apart while folding our respective small piles of laundry and she used the word solitude so calmly and in such a way that I also perceived in her a sense of acceptance and purpose in using that word, I realized that I used the word lonely when I could not quite wrap my hands around the peacefulness of the concept of solitude. She serenely accepted solitude for good, quiet and private reasons.

I will consider my conversation with her on Saturday mornings, explore more of this feeling of alienation, lack of touch and emotional voyages during this particular tough period in our lives.

And I realized that in this 'too much time on my hands' that my reading has changed to the issue of solitude, quiet, and almost primitive isolation. I've turned to such tomes of quietude as Henri Nouwen's Genes Diary report from the Trappist monastery. Here's the quote from Nouwen: "The measure of your awareness of God's transcendent call to each person is the measure of your capacity for intimacy with others."

Just as important is David Steindl-Rast's Music of Silence, a small but incredibly personal and significant volume mixing chant, canonical hours and seasons, poetry by Rilke and Frost, and Buddhism into an angelic day's journey from dark to desk in a monastic solitude. Here's something from his book: "The hour of vigils is also a symbol of the waking up we have to do in the midst of our lives. The kind of world in which we live is really a benighted world. This watching in the night and waiting for the light. This wakefulness is a forceful reminder to wake up throughout the day from the world of sleep to another reality, a daydream, a chance remark, overheard a fleeting thought that crosses our mind as we wait in the express lane of the supermarket may be the message of an angel passing it swiftly as a shooting star in the night sky. It's time to wake up."

And then there is Pema Chodron's 'The Places That Scare You', a guide to fearlessness in difficult times. From Chodron: "Confess your hidden faults. Approach what you find repulsive. Help those you think you cannot help. Anything you are attached to, let it go. Go to the places that scare you"

All of these books have been in my possession for years in the spiritual corner of my library, but they seem to have quietly edged into my consciousness, as the need to understand or at least rationally contemplate this sad world just outside my door.

Just outside my door is a place I want to comprehend and wish to absorb. A headline reads,"Loneliness is a health hazard too" and we know this to be a truism, don't we?

An editorial by David capital. Kopp, the CEO of Healthline capital Media capital, said: "Here's the other thing that aided me more than expected: the lack of casual contact with others. No nods to familiar faces on the train, no hallway conversations at the office, no spontaneous drop-ins to meetings and this was only week on!"

He went on to state the 28% of older Americans, 14.3 million people, live alone. Oh my. My heart related to this and I wondered how millions of my compadres by themselves are fairing without the 'stroke' of companionship. Not the text or email, but the nods, the smile, the phone call, the reassuring touch of a friend's hand.

British historian Herbert Butterfield, surveyed the cataclysm of world war II and wrote in 1949: "Men may live to a great age in days of comparative quietness and peaceful progress without ever having come to grips with universe, without ever vividly realizing the problems and the paradoxes with which human history so often confronts us, the chanciness of human life and the precarious nature of man's existence in this risky universe."

Butterfield, capital the belief that cataclysms -- and we may say will or may not, that this current crisis is cataclysmic -- still retain the possibility of "redeeming catastrophe by turning it into a grand creative moment"

Is that possible?

I find myself listening to certain pieces of music these days... larghetto by Dvorak... the Second Symphony Adagio by Rachmaninov, Pavane by Faure, a sedate Brahms Sonata, or a Nocturne by Chopin. Each in their own way displaying a minor chord angst, but from their worries and lonely centers come a recapitulation of hope, of wistfulness and acceptance of solitude and in recognition of spring's herald.

It is spring in early one, it seems with sunshine pouring through my window upon my hand as I write this, a walkthrough Fall Creek, or Sapsucker Woods at dawn brings a herald of bird song, forsythia and crocus, awaiting saffron or the early Willow and I realized that God's creatures and creation are neither slowed nor deterred by our own human travails. Nature, both sister and mother, prevails as it must, has and will.

I hear birds, I see Springs green. I feel our human loneliness and still look for capitulation or redemption, an end to our inner pain of isolation and perhaps as Butterfield opined, a grand, creative and renewing moment in America in our own history.

Another grand and great awakening mayhaps?

Be well. Take care of each other. Stay aware. We are still learning.