Interconnectedness

Due to happenstance, I have had the misfortune of trying to survive the weekend without the internet. A possibly minor hindrance really, most of my school work and research can be handled on campus (although Lord knows I miss the convenience of off-campus assess to the PsychInfo database!), but it left me with a sense of disconnect. At the moment of writing, I’m still unable to access the internet, the telephone, or any television channel. In retrospect that’s probably a good thing, lesser distractions mean more time for writing papers, but still…!

As people we have an instinctive need to feel connected to other people. To be understood, to have social interactions, but above all else, to be loved by another. I suppose this bellies the fact that we’re born alone, and die alone; and those two extremes force us to consider how much loneliness we can stand, which evidently isn’t much. I like my solitude. I like the fact that I can sit in my own internal world and mull over things – although I’m convinced my family is somehow contriving to disrupt that whenever possible. But as much as I enjoy the silence and the solitude, I hunger for a greater sense of connect. To have situations where I am constantly in interaction with other persons, even if it involves sitting at a computer ignoring pressing schoolwork and talking about nothing to people I don’t physically see.

It’s paradoxical though, that sometimes in the silence of solitude I feel the most connected. And yet there is that seeking of immediate contact nibbling away at the edges of peripheral vision. Beckoning coyly with its siren song. The urge to reach out and touch someone. Perhaps it’s just life seeking balance. I understand the concept of equilibrium, but more often than not I notice I tend to straddle two extremes. Sometimes I’m so inconsistent on issues.

Octavio Paz once wrote that solitude is the profoundest fact of the human condition, because only man knows that he is alone. At the most basic and fundamental level, we are all solitary creatures and sometimes we just want to connect, to crash if you will, into each other to create that friction, create some heat, and hopefully forget for a moment that we are solitary, separated from each other by walls of flesh, custom and cognition.

I find it truly ironic in myself that as much as I like to get to know people, and interact with people, and spend time with people, that there are these mental barriers which dictate exactly how far I will go in any given relationship, be it a friendship or otherwise. Some would have noticed that I never do call, even though we can connect well on some level, or that I never actually ask for a phone number, or follow up with a ‘let’s get coffee’. A sort of mental ‘arm’s length’ if you will. On one level, these are mental walls that I’ve subconsciously erected (God knows why, I don’t) and have great difficulty circumventing, even though I am aware of their existence. Freud would remark something about a dysfunctional coping mechanism ala reaction formation or something along those lines. I’m not a fan of psychoanalytic theory.