Alone, Together

How is everyone? Come on in, we're live.

It's Alone Together.

This title came to me kind of this morning.

I was walking and I was thinking about my recent experience in Japan and coming home and watching again the movie Perfect Days by Wim Wenders about this Japanese guy who cleans toilets.

And this phrase alone together like really encapsulates what a lot of that experience is like.

You're and how do I even talk about this? It's kind of hard to talk about.

We're wired as social creatures.

And yet I've always noticed this tension in me that that being enmeshed with other humans is also very painful.

Like it's also exceedingly painful, especially as these sort of identity structures and self and all that is kind of seen through.

When you're really enmeshed with another person, meaning this apparent other, what you feel is a lot of projection they're projecting onto you or a lot of the contraction of me or a lot of the sort of delusive chitter of the matrix trying to reinforce and protect itself.

Like this is how things are.

There's meaning that we need to seek and purpose in life and you need to change the world and, you know, find your meaning and your purpose and your and I'm here to to project onto you what your meaning and purpose is, because I myself don't know what I am.

So to some degree, that's very uncomfortable.

It gets increasingly uncomfortable.

To another degree, it's kind of seen immediately as just another dance, another appearance of phenomena.

It just seems that way, but it's just an appearance.

But this alone together.

So then you go to Japan and you see people sitting at an izakaya counter or something eating surrounded by people, but they're all alone.

And there's an occasional glance or a word exchanged, a nod.

And then you realize there's always it's always oneness kind of interacting with itself as a dance.

Nothing's really separate to be interacting with anything.

And so a fleeting glimpse or a nod or just being around apparent others is no less meaningful than a deep in depth conversation.

And it got me thinking about this so-called loneliness epidemic.

We are making that shit up.

We're creating the loneliness epidemic by being continuing to reify, to make real this idea that there's a me in here that needs someone else to make it whole, to make it OK, to make it connected.