Belonging and Being Separate

I decide to walk along Don Mills after work, to meet my friend and colleague at a restaurant. It feels good not to be indoors or inside a bus. The ground appears to have the remnants of an earlier rain-shower, now evaporating into a hazy mist. I gaze out past the bridge at the ensuing traffic. The cars are going down the same road that they always have. But are they the same cars, and is it for the same reasons? I feel a sense of freedom that comes from surrendering the tightness of my body and the feeling of being obligated to other beings.

I want to explore one of the most perplexing contradictions in my life, namely between the desire to belong) and the freedom of being alone. In fact, there is no real ‘contradiction’ at all. But there are certain kinds of attachments there. Too much belonging can lead to a very mechanical existence of trying to keep up with those around me. It becomes like me comparing myself to other people and being afraid of falling behind from them. The irony is that the more I wish to belong with others, the narrower my existence becomes. In the effort to keep up with the things that might make me agreeable to others, I lose my inner passions. But I also end up fearing the loss of others, particularly those from whom I am somehow borrowing passions. I sometimes have compared this to the moon reflecting the sun’s light.

Some people have suggested the alternative to be a kind of rugged individualism. There are people who are so into their own creativity that it overshadows their need for the companionship of others. Thoreau is perhaps a paradigmatic case of the self-made person. But even Thoreau acknowledged his connection to the natural world, perhaps more so than other people.

I start to sense, in fact, that both ‘the need to belong’ and ‘the need to be alone’ are attachments to false concepts.  Belonging is the attachment to the concept of merger, which never fully happens in the end. At the end of the day, I go home as me (or a temporary version of me) and you go home as you. We have different experiences, and there is no way of saying that we see the same things. Not only that, but it is never possible to make an impression on everyone all the time, so the effort to belong all the time is rather futile. We have to be able to allow others to have their shining moments as well, which requires surrendering the sense of always being approved or recognized.

On the other hand, total ‘solitude’ is also illusory, because there is no such thing as a single solitary being. We are always being with or among other beings. But the real problem is that I don’t really know from one moment to the next who I will be and in what configuration, so I try to seek a very clear and certain sense of myself. But is that clarity ever possible? I have heard many people talk about being “secure within themselves”, but I wonder what this experience really refers to. The closest I can get to it is a sense that, no matter what happens to us, all is okay in the universe. This might be described as the sense that some fundamental part of us is being taken care of. I don’t need to ‘make myself’ any more than a tree needs to make itself grow. And we can’t measure growth in any other way except in terms of the thing itself. To try to use a yardstick to describe a tree’s development is already deviating from the tree’s unique tree-ness.

By denying both total belonging and total separation, I try to suggest that each moment is a creative merger around these themes. They are almost two different forces that spin around us (centri-pedal and centrifugal), and one can only stop to wonder how they combine and recombine at various moments in life.  For example, there are times when I am very gregarious around people and get lots of energy being around great conversation, while there are other times when I feel completely shut down and unable to connect.  When I ‘shut down’, what is this really expressing? Is it the unrequited desire to feel recognized by others, or is it the defiant desire to move away from all company? As I say this, I recognize that for the most part, I am not in control of this much of the time. But I can see the spectrum of emotions without saying that one is me and the other is not me. Both belonging and separation are familiar to my being. But are they my whole being?