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autonomy
November 2009 
What is your relationship to independence?
Posted on Jul 6th, 2009
by 
Laura
Laura
This is in Response to the Questions and Reflections for July 04, 2009:
Paradoxical. Historically it's been a real challenge for me to live with another person, at least in the past five or so years. It seems to be part of my nature to need solitude almost fiercely at times. But of course solitude and independence are far from the same thing. I often worry that I need people much less than others seem to. This is not to say that I don't need them at all, that I don't value conversation and the intimacy of close friendship and the sharing of meals and fears and music and passions and basketball games and being in the breath of the world with others. I do, and sometimes it's revelatory to me how much. I couldn't be happy as a teacher without that tug, that capacity to enlarge my scope of self and consciousness. (Of course, teaching wears me out, too. Part of the deal. ) Still, this realization of my need for others seems to be a sort of temporary epiphany. I value the detachment of observation very much, but I often find myself planning how I will relate what I experience to my friends and family and other folks too. I suppose I always will come back to the circumstance of needing friends who will, as Nanci Griffith once said, "endure my solitude."
Access: PublicTagged with: QaR, independence, connection, dependency, relationships, solitude, awareness, autonomy
and of course, only you know if this is true or not
And I don't suppose I truly know. that's ok. it just feels true. No one seems to mind much.
Solitude is a kind of waiting in anticipation.It is the pause between the body of our shared social lives and the skin of our independence.Solitude can refresh or drive to distraction. How we choose to fill our solitary hours determines the display of our spiritual treasures,our expressions,creations, and life goals.
But for me it isn't always about waiting. sometimes it's just about being, with no one else around. other times it is about being in between. It has driven me to distraction at times for sure, but that isn't a long trip for me. I do love your phrase “the pause between the body of our shared social lives and the skin of our independence.” a pause can be full of nothing in a very luminous and essential way.
If solitude can drive to distraction at times then it also leads to new revelations. Isn't a distraction sometimes a good thing? I remember being alone in the house on quiet ,rainy afternoons. Friends call on the phone and I enjoy quick conversations like the fizzling of a July 4th sparkler. For a scintillating moment our smiling faces are illumined by the explosion of word then we're plunged into the darkness of solitude again. In the empty house,I find long forgotten ideas bubbling to the daylight of reason. I wander from room to room,looking in dresser drawers. I sit to rest at a writing desk ,its surface bare except for a few apple peel shavings, a worn parchment, a sharpened pencil, and its over-stuffed desk drawers packed with a life's business of living. And still I wonder what I was looking for, I'll find it with the next knock on the door.
Thass what I'm talkin about. yep. I have one of those formally diagnosed distraction disorders and honestly I don't think I want to completely erase those tendencies. they take me places I need to go. streams of consciousness heading off from a steadier bigger river, if you will.
In need for a co-navigator,darling friend? You can take the helm. I'll climb the mast to the crow's nest and watch the far horizon. Together,or with a little help from friends, we'll espy the local land paradise for a rootless culture.
I preciate it, but I can see pretty well from here. ; ) thanks, though. I'm of several minds about rootless culture. is there such a thing?
I struggle with that as well. most times I would just as soon be alone but that is because I have the choice I think.