I think one of the first reasons I knew I wanted to write was that I’ve always enjoyed my alone time. This may seem like an odd thing to boast of but every time I hear some professional writer say the best quality to have if you wish to follow in their footsteps is to be okay being alone.
Maybe this should be taken as a grain of salt as I am a millennial with a cellphone, I’m writing this with it in fact. So, this begs the question of how alone is really meant by such a statement. Is it literal or figurative loneliness?
I say it’s the former. It’s the isolation from people which allows one to sink into thought and spew it out for others to read. But, there’s nothing lonely about a good writer, the good writer is nothing without their experience in life.
To continue a theme of past posts, we are obsessed with our interactions with others. Those who are successful with personal interaction are no different from those who suck at it.
It’s a constant evaluation, subconscious or conniving, which we as people perform of others. I think it’s important to understand that humans are nothing when singular. A human is meaningless in the grand scheme of things without many others human(s).
So, the writing I do, that anyone does, is about interacting, I’d say perfecting this action, with the hopes of better interacting with people around us. That’s why some people write literature of protest and some of people writing false codicils to wills for the purpose of stealing a portion of an estate.
Obviously the importance of the former cannot be overstated, while all problems may matter, not all problems result in death. Racism, sexism, pervasive violence and destruction and such issues when a reality and not merely something that you discuss over the dinner table with a sympathetic and yet languid frown is just about the most horrific thing in my mind, not in my reality though.
That is why I can only imagine and attempt to help, I don’t know if I do enough but I try, anyways. These are the things which flit through the fog as I sit on my friend’s dock in Muskoka, Lake Kahshe.
I came down early in the morning that day, around nine o’clock and it was Sunday, so I was the only person around. No one awake in the cottage or at any other one I saw from my chair, a Muskoka chair of course.
I wonder if this is the kind of alone they mean, the successful writers. Alone and many kilometres from the city.
This sort of separation always helps me valorize the things I worry about, or at least that which occupies my mind. And so, sitting on such a dock in such a place, it left me to wonder what I really want for myself, for my family and my future family and how can I achieve that. But mainly I asked what ways I could most assuredly find happiness.
I believe we are nothing if not happy as people and the best way to be happy as people is to be around other people. This mainly is why I hate the restrictions forced upon minorities, women and whoever else isn’t favoured by the ruling class.
When sitting there, despite my efforts to hang around Socrates, Aristophanes and Phaedrus as they discussed, I couldn’t help thinking how my place in life seems to have been assured from the start and through no action of my own. I feel as though I owe everything, that most people owe everything to those who came before.
I guess the purpose here is that I am saying we should let people see what they end up doing when not repressed. Where they decide to lay their heads at night without feeling afraid, without being forced to live in a certain area for arbitrary bullshit.
It would be nice if we were all free for once so that we can focuse on getting to Mars and stuff like that too.
Clay
Clayton Tomlinson 