Midweek Musings

I was flipping through a notebook I kept in Germany last December, and came across this entry:

It's dark at 9 p.m. and I'm on the bus
Burger King on the left
I feel the most sober sense of solitude
Wheels turning on old cement
Dim blue light inside
Only road ahead, no longer anything
to my right or left
I can breathe, and nobody feels it
I am traveling alone
and could do it for days
But once in a while I would like
to share this with a friend

What is it really to be alone and to feel alone? Accelerated thoughts about this tend to come up on long bus rides, or randomly in the middle of the night.

Friends and people around have been constant sources of inspiration and happiness.

Sometimes in a group I lose myself. Dynamics of the relationship -- like empathy, sharing, motivation, tension, disagreements, become more focal.

"Being alone" has given me space to collect my thoughts and develop my ideas. But it also has led me into deep, abstract areas without exits.

I end up wondering whether we are having false feelings of loneliness or false feelings of togetherness.

Some friends have expressed the belief that we are all alone at the core. Others talk about humanity as one, with each person making up part of the larger picture. Are we all just saying the same thing, but in different words and with different focuses?

For some reason, I keep going back to what a shopkeeper in Tzfat told me, "The most important thing is that we breathe. Everything else is just extra."