A Full Emptiness

What is to be said about being alone? Not in a global, philosophical sense, nor in a self-depricating sense; simply in spending time solitarily.

I'm suddenly hesitant to use the term "spending time with oneself," because it seems like that phrase feels defensive. There is much pressure, especially at college, to be opening one's world. The most available, and certainly easiest, way of doing this is to spend time with people. After all, you are surrounded by people whose lives differ from yours immeasurably, yet you inhabit the same space. I am certainly not anti-this action. Indeed, I find it meaningful myself. Quite the understatement, I know, and its merits deserve their own treatises. Spending time with oneself seems like a rebute to this pressure- I'm not alone, I'm with myself.

What is this implying? That "myself" is different from the solitary individual giving it its own time? As far as I know, I don't posess any sort of spiritual resevoir in myself that is only able to be tapped when I am alone. True, I am more focused and attentive to my thoughts and my surroundings when not being distracted with the needs of those around me.

Indeed I am a different person when nestled in my own little world, currently addressed within the dorm dubbed Elton, room 109, than when I am present outside, amongst my friends and acquaintences. The organic makeup of those differences eludes me, however. When "outside," I am the sum of (other people's assumptions and knowledge about me) and (myself in comparison to those around me). What I am in my own head and heart certainly matters, but when it comes down to it, sadly, my own existence depends wholly on the perception of others...socially speaking, of course.

So perhaps it is that which makes up the structure of those differences between the self outside and the self with whom I am currently spending the day. The fact that, at the moment, I am wholly the sum of what I believe myself to be. The moment I am face to face with another, who I am becomes who I want to be, who I want to be like, what I want to be known as. In my particular case, those two items are not radically different, but this is not so for many people.

In a way, though, the outside social world serves as a proof for the time spent alone. As I am brooding, pondering either nothing or everything, the details of details of things that may or may not affect anything, I am in need of confirmation of myself. How shall I know if I am truly what I want to be? I need other people to tell me. I am, of course, biased towards myself, as are many people, I would imagine. But if I see success coming out of this time searching, alone, for the path lost in the melange of social pressure points sprouting up in my daily life, then it also legitimizes my time spent unaccompanied. For it is in that time that I regain composure and remind myself what it is like to be me, myself, and that I remain a buoyant figure in an overpopulated, gravity-heavy ocean.

It is of course a system of checks and balances. When I am in one medium (alone or outside), I long for the other. Such, however, are the ways of life. In both cases, however, lies an unquenchable thirst for connection. To what, exactly, I wish to be attatched to and inhabit, remains elusive and transcendent.

a short explanation on my current State

I, and I assume you, are pretty clear on the concept of things cancelling each other out, whether in math, or in war theory or whatever. But what about emotions? At the moment I have three main emotions (these are the main ones, grant you, not the only ones): excitement, sadness and anxiety. I realize that sadness is not the most poetic of words, nor is it the most specific, but at the moment it's all that comes to mind.
I am excited for school. Quite simple. Theres a few things I can't wait to do, a few people I will be really happy to see (one in particular, for which the happiness is the base upon which many other emotions are jumping, trying to turn the calendar faster than its nature allows it), and some experiences I am antsy to get underway.
I am sad because I have spent little time at home this summer, and spent likewise little time with some of my older relatives, mentioned in yesterday's writings. I said my farewell to my maternal grandparents, the relatives I am closest with save of course my parents. I knew and still know that going far away for school was the correct choice for me, but I can't help but think that that decision came at the cost of being with them in their twilight years. Of course, I spent 18 happy years close to their presence, and we talk on the phone often, but there is only so much you can get out of a phone conversation that pales to sitting next to them. Also, recent time spent here has revealed to me the shrinking number of people I want to spend time with who reside in Encinitas and environs. This too is a macabre state of affairs. So it is with this heavy heart that I take off from Lindbergh field, in contrast to the fast-beating heart that will accompany on the descent into Bradley International near the Massachusetts-Connecticut border.
Relating back to my original premise, these two emotions have seemingly cancelled each other out. No sooner am I thinking how excited I am to be going back to the mysteriously fulfilling struggle that is college than I remember I will be without my grandmother's smile when I enter her house for another chicken-and-vegetable Friday night dinner. Although I put it in that particular order, it could easily have been in reverse. I like to think that these thoughts leave me with a neutral state of mind.
So, if we can imagine the two cancelling each other out, leaving an opening where they had been residing, we must remember anxiety. This elusive energy logically would take their place. Where does it come from? I believe it resides in both the previous emotions described, not so much in the general idea but within the specific items that procure the two blanket states. Specifically, it is the spice, the twinge, the small catalyst that makes those ordinary events bloom into ones that inhibit excitement or sadness.
It is not fear, dear reader, it is not fear. Fears, however irrational, are attatched to a person, an animal, a situation. Anxiety, in this case, does no such attatching. I, in truth, don't know what I am anxious about. They are situations that may not happen. They are about leaving situations at home that may not exist. They are worries attatched to things which either I cannot control, making them extraneous and wasteful of my mental energy, or things I can entirely control, whereas my gut instinct and logical thinking can easily guide me without consequence (during the thought process, mind you).
Should the reader think that these two categories, situations in which one cannot control at all or has complete control, envelope most of the possibilities for a given situation, they may not be totally off. The space inbetween them is inhabited by evasive circumstances beyond my thinking at the moment. They do not, however, identify with my current state.
I suppose my advice to myself should be just to live and let happen. It is indeed easier said than done to not worry about the future or lament on the past. Joy and sadness will come as night and day, in turns and phases. And what of in between?
It could be neither, or it could be both. it is unstable ground on which I stand. Perhaps it is worth remembering that as day turns to night, the sky turns to colors fantastic and awesome. When the sky belongs to neither the moon nor the sun, we see it at its most alluring. Its beauty is in its brevity, its character in its synthesis.