The sandman slipped me something.

Last night I had the oddest sleeping experience in my recent memory. I'm in the habit of going to bed fairly early these days, 9:30-10:00pm-ish, on account of the working at 6:30am every weekday. Last night was no different starting out; in bed by 10 to 10, asleep minutes afterwards (yay for exhausting physical labour, no lying restlessly awake for this boy). Anyhow, my understanding of sleep is that on average males my age need about 5-6 hours of Slow-Wave-Sleep before reaching REM, or dream sleep. I find this to be pretty accurate with me, as I only seem to remember dreaming at all if I get at least 6 or 7 hours of sleep. Less than that, and it's just a black night. Anyhow, I did get to dreaming, but it was the oddest sort of feeling I've ever had whilst doing so. It was what I'll have to call 'half-lucid'. I was somewhat aware that I was dreaming, but there was an atypical "dullness" to the sensation... lucid dreaming is usually quite a rush for me. Anyhow, I ended up doing exactly what I always do, without fail, when I go lucid, which is fly around. When this starts working really well, I usually end up getting excited, my heart rate increases, and it wakes me up. But, thanks to this odd dullness, everything felt more relaxed, more normal, and I did not wake. The landscape was probably best described as southern British Columbia and the Canadian Shield mixed. Lots of birch and Douglas Firs, yadda yadda. I landed on this little piece of land where this medieval blacksmith seemed to be working on a few things. I spoke with him for a while, and then for some reason I was roused from sleep, but not too jarringly. I looked over at my alarm clock... it was only 2:20am! I have no idea why I was dreaming so early in the night, but I think the dullness -might- have something to do with the fact that I was dreaming from within a deeper type of sleep. A little more unconscious, if you will. Anyhow, I slipped back to sleep, and the dream continued (another rarity for me... they don't usually resume. In fact, I can't remember a single instance of a dream picking up right where it left off in the same night). I can't remember a great deal of it anymore, after a full day of work, but it maintained that half-lucid feeling, until I woke up 2 minutes before my alarm clock. That was a plus, because I got to shut the damn thing off and contemplate the experience for a couple minutes instead of being shocked out of sleep by scratchy radio. I noticed that I didn't exactly feel rested, and my heart was definitely beating more rapidly than it usually is first thing in the morning. I woke up a couple of times during the dreaming, once around 3:30am and then again shortly after 5am, and finally at 5:43 for the last time. I guess I had been dreaming off and on for over at least 3 hours. Lots of things happened, event after event, a couple of shifts in focus, periodic increases in lucidity. It was crazy. I felt a little off, like I'd just been running around in my head for the last 3 hours, but it didn't take me long to get my bearings, and the day turned out to be great. I had lots of energy and a calm that hasn't visited me in a while. I wish I could remember more of the specific events of the dreams but I thought that the This-World portions of the experience were worth noting down.

A Solitary Irony

I'm going to share a secret with you. A special kind of secret... the kind that you can't really know just by having someone tell you. You have to experience it for yourself. It's for this reason that I'm comfortable calling it a 'secret'; an experiential secret, which I find most people don't get.

Okay, here goes. You ready?

Unless you choose otherwise, you never have to be alone. Ever.

Now for the ironic part: How can this be achieved?

By learning how to be alone.

Now for the longwinded explanation:

Almost everywhere you go on this continent you can find people finding each other... for all the wrong reasons. Oh, don't get me wrong, there's no shortage of right reasoning and healthy relationships, they just (ironically) don't seem to be found within the confines of the relationships we seem to hold in the highest regard --> Romantic relationships and family relationships. The two are, of course, very inter-related. Family relationships grow out of what we generally call romantic relationships, though how much of a role actual 'romance' plays in them varies. For the sake of clarity though, I'll use the term 'romantic' and hope you'll understand my meaning. I want to talk about these kinds of relationships chiefly and I'll need to call them something to start out.

That being said: There seems to be an epidemic in this loving world. Honestly, I'm kind of surprised we do as well as we do, considering all the influences that come into play. For example... (prepare yourself... here comes a buzzword): Media! I know, I know - what does that even mean? In this case: movies, music, literature, television shows and advertisements, magazines, etc. Media is the first propagator of the epidemic. Another: Social structures! The legal constructions (marriage, divorce, child custody, child tax credit, legal ownership of items and property, etc, etc.) that inevitably influence our emotional endeavours. Then, there's the 'norm' of history - the mindsets espoused by nearly everyone in the preceeding generations.

The cliché boils down predictably to this:

Success = Good Education + Significant Other + Offspring and Comfortable Living through Meaningful Employment x 1.

The thing is, what constitutes Good, Comfortable, and Meaningful has been decided before we got here, and that's why our social and legal systems are, well... a lot of the ways they are. They were designed to uphold a certain kind of life. But, here we have a classic Chicken and the Egg scenario: Needs for life -->(lead to) a design to fulfill those needs -->(which leads to) promoting the importance of the needs the design has been made to fill! In other words: "You need THIS because that's what has been built to give you."

Now, this illustration is somewhat inappropriate. There's probably no individual person, some diabolical control freak, out there thinking about this formula in this exact manner, so consciously and literally. Rather, my explicit writing is the subtext of a side effect of a human process. There's no big conspiracy - it's just where we've arrived. Success is defined by that process, in the round about way that it does. Now, I'm saying, we need to redefine success, happiness, love... we need to start a new journey.

For the record, I know I'm not the only one on this page. None of this is wildly original, but I do think it is something that is going to keep pounding on the door to our minds until more of us let it in and try it out, because I think the slow consensus is turning out to be: We're here, and we're not happy. We're following the strategies and formulas that are being given to us, but we're still not happy. But where is 'here', for our most desired, passionate, frustrating, dysfunctional, lovely relationships, exactly?

Let's describe the process: Boy meets girl. Or vice versa. Or boy meets boy, girl/girl... or it's a mutual meeting, whatever. None of that really matters. What matters is what happens right after. A lot of people call it 'falling in love' and in some cases it is. But in too many, it's not. Those are the cases I'm talking about now. What is it really? The attainment of satisfaction.

Satisfaction? Well now you're saying, "Gee JC, that's not so bad, is it?" Then I'll ask: Satisfaction for what? An absence. Absence of what? Well... love (I'm not going in circles, just bear with me). While I know it may seem perfectly normal to understand a significant other's purpose as precisely this sort of satisfaction, to bring love into a life that doesn't have it - it's not - and it never should be. Why???

Because why do we conceive of this absence in the first place?

Because that's what we are told. We're told just that by innumerable sources in the world around us.

"An anthropologist once asked a Hopi why so many of his people's songs were about rain. The Hopi replied that it was because water is so scarce. Is that why so man of your songs are about love?"

~Gregory McNamee

It's true, an overwhelming amount of the art and media that is, to borrow a phrase from Matt Good, 'beamed into our heads' has to do with the absolute bliss and excruciating agony that can only be found in romantic relationships. This is not itself a problem. The problem lies with how we have come to construct our understandings of just what a romantic relationship means. Unconsciously for many, a romantic relationship is part of that equation for a successful life. Consciously this often manifests as an absolute certainty that life is not complete, even the SELF is not complete (!) without this experience. But what is this experience? Well honestly, there's probably no single answer to that question... and there shouldn't be. However, we do love the occasional sign, a marker, a goal post... something to let us know that we are 'winning life'. So, we look to standards: Sexual attraction? Enjoy spending time together? Similar interests? So far so good... but the standards evolve: Good sex life? Married? Kids? Good jobs? Enough time between work and leisure? Well balanced, socially acceptable hobbies? If you've checked yes to all of these questions, congratulations, you are a fully functional, happy human being. If you checked no to one or more, please consider seeing a therapist or something, because you're missing out on the real deal! Or maybe you're screwed up. Hmmm...

Bull-shit.

Ahem, sorry... back to reality. My point is: Fulfilling traditional life milestones is not the surefire path to happiness. The truly significant milestones, for the self, are achieved by knowing what makes you happy... and not just seeking out the things that SHOULD make us happy, as we've been trained to do it. Sadly, through this training, we have largely lost another kind of training: The ability to pay attention to what makes us truly happy.

This ability is thwarted at nearly every turn. We are so apprehensive about change, about not fitting in, about the unknown... things that paying attention to yourself can bring about in spades. Instead, we opt for pre-fabricated answers, like microwavable bacon - no introspection, no joy for the journey, the discovery, the creation, the trial AND error that takes place towards this information... we want our perfect life and we want it NOW.

The irony is, the perfect life IS happening now... and we're missing it, because we're not paying attention. Instead, we're paying attention to our sex drives, lives, appeal... and often the happiness of every OTHER person besides ourselves, either because we aim to please, or we can't be pleased unless the people around us approve. We live lives of addiction - to alcohol and to substances, sure, but most often, the addiction is to other people, to trying to be happy vicariously through others. If they're happy, I'm happy. If the world says I'm winning, I am.

But we're not. We're losing. Losing ourselves. Some of us are better at self-convincing than others, and some actually manage to find some real happiness by chance while walking this path, but for the most part, it has one main result: "Something's just... not quite right, but I can't put my finger on it. I'm doing everything I can think of, yet something's... off. What is it?"

When that question pops into our minds, that's us, knocking on our own doors. Most people decide to ignore it and simply go on reminding themselves about everything they've accomplished and how that is more than enough evidence that everything is assuredly quite alright, that they SHOULD be happy. As we get older, investigating this little questioning voice seems to be more costly, because we have more responsibilities and can't afford to lose stability for very long. We often decide that we're never going to 'put our finger on it'... it's just easier not to. I mean, really, if you're not absolutely miserable, falling apart at the seams... why should you rock the boat?

But just like water erodes away at stone, the 'us' that we banish to fringes of our mind is relentless, and catches up with us eventually. Hell, this phenomenon is so common, it even has a very recognizable cultural label: Mid-Life Crisis. But in actuality, it can and does happen at every point in life; in youth, mid-life, old age, and death bed. It happens in many different ways, and with varying degrees of effects, to all kinds of people, not just middle-aged folks. Sadly, the sudden effort to get back to the real self often fails because in all the time we spent living through other people, we really did forget how to listen to ourselves. The voice is relentless, but it requires practice to choose its advice. That kind of practice does not exist in large quantities. It's like handing a blind-from-birth person a pencil and telling them to draw a picture of a bird. It exists out there, surely, but we've never seen it before... so how do we start?

This 'crisis' thing happens in romantic relationships, too. In the beginning, it's great - you're filling that absence, running on lovely endorphins, and undoubtedly having some very real and great mutual experiences. But then our 'education' seeps in, sometimes consciously, sometimes unconsciously. "You NEED this relationship. This is part of the recipe for a great life... for ultimate happiness here on earth. You don't want to lose it. If the other person becomes unhappy, you may lose it. If YOU become unhappy, you may lose it. One must prevent this at all costs." Again, this line of thinking almost never happens consciously. It's a subtle, conditioned response. We start subtly curving our behavior to accomodate the other person, to accomodate the 'health' of the relationship. But we're listening to pre-fabricated ideas at this point, and not ourselves. The longer this ignorance continues, the farther away things get from where they should be. Dissatisfaction starts creeping into the relationship... we banish it for as long as we can. Relationships are supposed to be happy things, after all. Or, we find little, easily fixable things to 'fix'ate on, so that we can reproduce that satisfied feeling once more, and keep it going a little longer. But the dissatisfaction comes back. It's us. It's them. It's neither, it's life. It's just not working. Oh God it's not working... what do I do? Eventually we can't shut out the dissatisfaction any longer and SOMETHING has to give. What 'gives' in any given situation varies greatly - from the small, to the tragic, in some cases.

For some people, this formula doesn't end badly... it works perfectly. Kudos to you. However, I'm writing this for those cases where it doesn't work that way. It's for those people who are lost, and confused; afraid and in denial about their fear and happiness.

And so I come to how to never ever be alone, through learning how to be alone.

Alone. All-one. Singularly whole.

We feel that absence of love in our lives because we've put it there - we've cut ourselves out, in half, apart. We do this by listening to anything and everything that says we are not complete, and that that is no way to be. We are complete - we just haven't pulled back the curtain to see it yet. That pulling back the curtain... that's called life. One day at a time.

When we live with ourselves, in love, in satisfaction with our own existence, with gratitude for even our stumblings, our unfulfilled desires... our whole world changes. The way you are and the kinds of relations you build with other people change radically. Fear of loss, of rejection and the unknown become trivial considerations instead of heart stopping, mind-jarring tragedies to be avoided at all costs. We become WHOLE people. A whole person, not requiring an external source to fill our void. We become stable, independent - independently happy, and from there we can see what life really is; who we really are, and then, we can choose to act on that knowledge consciously, instead of having it knock on our back door all the time. That puts us in control... and with that control, we can choose what we want. And if we don't get what we want, that's okay, because we're okay on our own. Ultimately, that's the message truly listening to yourself gives.

Now, here's the hard part, the catch: I can't tell you how to listen to yourself (to use your intuition). I won't lie, a lot of people try, but fail. An internet blog is not an efficient medium for teaching that kind of skill, and its scarce in any medium. We've forgotten how. The one thing I do know, however, is this: The first and most important thing you need to learn is the courage to try, and travel to the places and experiences upon which you may fear to tread. And if you get there, and it's scary and uncomfortable as hell, remember to always ask yourself: Who is informing me on this decision? Me, or a pre-fabricated idea? I think you will thank yourself in the long run if you don't simply take the world's word for it, and evaluate every idea with your intuition. Intuition is hard... it's a different kind of thinking. It's thinking that doesn't factor in familiar ways. In fact, it's a very unfamiliar kind of thinking for most of us, which makes it weird, and frightening. The answers it gives can often be even more frightening. But when it comes down to it, it's the best judge of our own truths that we have. And to quote:

"Truth is a hard master and costly to serve, but it simplifies all problems." ~Ellis Peters

Could not have said it better myself.