Wise Words and Random Encounters

This morning, in what has proven to be the best decision I’ve made in a long time I went to my local big box store intent on picking up a few Spring flowers.  And when I say a long time, I’m not wholly sure if I mean ten minutes or if I mean one thousand hours or a million years – the construct of time has appreciably changed since we started using the “Q” word, hasn’t it?  Despite “social distancing” being my natural and preferred life posture, I’ve missed you humans a helluva lot more than I ever thought I could or ever believed I would admit publicly.  High-functioning introverts such as I am recharge from reflective time alone, word?  Where others crave interaction, we crave isolation.  When you might go out, I’m def stayin’ in.   I’ve learned this week though that without that requisite, day-to-day social drain, my batteries became overcharged.  Still not willing to internalize that I need other random people, but also recognizing the intrinsic necessity that my hands touch the healing power of the Earth’s soil on some regular basis, away I went.  That specific mission was an abject failure by the way, but we’ll get to that.

I would be remiss if I took full credit for this action.  Full disclosure – the subtle cracks in my solitary armor that I alluded to above, opened into exposed chasms…impassable gaps between my perceived reality and my actual reality by the end of the week.  Gaps become canyons only by exploration, and I’m an explorer so that was a bad deal Friday night.  Introspection overdone, as it turns out and as is true with all the other things – anything overdone is a negative unequaled.  Still, internally unaware entirely and upon reaching out to a trusted friend, I was snapped back…awakened.  She didn’t sugarcoat or give me a pass for being an asshole, but she did have some good advice.  Wise beyond her years as ever, she said I should get out – be IN the world.  The irony, that I had given our entire staff that same advice just a short time before but had not fully heeded it myself was not lost on me.  My days have been spent inexplicably and involuntarily glued to the news – shut it down, she said.  But I’m all about stats and graphs and charts, I retorted – that’s how I make sense of it all.  “You know everything you need to know to stay alive…so GO!  BE alive.” 

Responding to these words, I got vertical and mobile with a renewed cocky quickness.  Still reeling from my self-imposed mania, and with no clear plan of attack – the mission failed.  I wandered the aisles forever it seemed…at least an hour in the garden area alone.  I must have examined, at an almost biological level every single plant specimen on display and refused them all for a myriad of utterly ridiculous rationales.  Indecisive.  Anxious AF for even being there…away from my fortress of solitude or whatever.  Defeated and ashamed, I walked away.

Recently, in the vast and unending time I mentioned earlier, my old friend Marcus Aurelius said a thing to me inside of the immense cavern of my own personal holy shit – I might be losing it this time for real puzzle.  "You have power over your mind – not outside events.  Realize this, and you will find strength."  His words were burning in my brain walking empty-handed back to my truck.  What a shitty Stoic you are homey, said I to myself.  My increasingly public display of having adopted Stoicism as a lifepath hung in the balance of my next move.  Yes.  That is way more dramatic than it should be or needs to be, but whatever.

I mentioned the stats earlier – despite good advice, I’m still locked in on the reg.  I can’t separate my reality from our reality, you know?  Since I started writing this, worldwide cases of COVID-19 have gone from 320 to 336,000+.  That’s a reality that we can’t avoid or reinvent, but there’s hope for us yet.  Here’s why!

As I sulked back to my truck, I couldn’t help but notice a guy struggling to solve his own personal conundrum.  He had apparently purchased a new dishwasher, but the vehicle within which he had arrived to make said purchase was dreadfully incapable of transporting product back to his domicile.  The poor guy had the thing out of the box, Corolla trunk open…he was just standing there looking at the situation like, “what the actual fuck?”  This moment is where my new normal starts to kick in.  I say new because I’ve seen similar events at the aforementioned big box in the past and laughed about it driving away.  Today – in stark comparison, I casually approached and asked, “you good”?  Knowing the answer, I was dropping the tailgate as I said it.  We loaded the dishwasher into my truck, and I followed him to his adorable little house in Little Five Points.  I think I had decided to hook the damn thing up for him by the time I got there, five minutes later.  His young (rightfully skeptical) wife caboshed that nonsense (given the environment) and I dropped their new appliance on the sidewalk and drove away.

There’s a lot that I could say about that singular event, but what I felt inside isn’t something that I can put into words.  Back at the crib, my internal emotional seed purified and buttressed by the karmic payment I’d just made, I found myself reflecting upon the nature of how and why and when we choose to live our lives…every single day in the normal world.  That deep dive made me question why whatever it was that had just happened, doesn’t happen on the daily.  I questioned, in the sober light of day why I don’t more often display publicly what I know is right internally.  Why isn’t this my every day?  Why isn’t this YOUR every day?

I’m not sure that it’s a Stoic virtue per se, but it’s an unavoidable fact of my life that I question.  Every.  Single.  Thing.  The day passed – recharged for sure but still conflicted, questioning.  Instead of my routine Sunday night takeout, I cooked spaghetti…like an end-of-the-world sized pot of spaghetti – I’m not immune to the panic buying phenomenon after all.  In the past few days, I’ve adopted through no voluntarily expression of my traditional temperament and despite my regular consternation, an inescapable desire to interact with my neighbors on a more consequential level.  They are ALWAYS walking their dogs or kids or whatever and I naturally / almost religiously ignore them because of it…because I’m an asshole, I just realized.  Regardless, these days, I step out if I’m not already out there, onto my stoop and say hello.  That’s a helluva thing right there, no?  I.  Say.  Hello.  Me?  Yep! 

A few weeks ago, I got new neighbors across the street in the yellow house that isn’t yellow anymore.  It’s been a minute since I felt like I had a word or more to say to any neighbors across any street.  I don’t know, never met ‘em before tonight…but they’ve got a dachshund so they must be cool.  Tonight, as I was chatting with them like a lunatic hermit from my front stoop, I asked if they were hungry.  Having cooked enough for the entire coming apocalypse, I divided my need by half and gave them what I couldn’t reasonably use.  Maybe I’m not an asshole after all.

I paraphrase once again the wise words of Marcus Aurelius…humans exist for the sake of other humans.  For all my “stoic” training and bluster, I don’t believe that I’ve ever fully grasped that specific ideal before now.  We have a collective moral responsibility to be there for each other in times of need.  Period.

Today was a good day – I needed it.