Only the Alone-ly

(Note: Written 2 hours prior in Brussels, now in Heathrow, London, broke down and paid for wi-fi...)

Sitting in the Brussels Airport, getting ready to board for my London connection through to Mumbai. Alone.

And, Roy Orbison is playing on the radio at the only coffee shop in the terminal, Starbucks. However, the ubiquitous free wi-fi that one would find in an American terminal is lacking, so either I will give in and actually pay for the wi-fi to make posts and check emails, or I will wait to see what Heathrow has to offer. I had better get used to being quite a bit more touch and go with my Internet access for the next two months.

Looking up at the Departures board when I came in, if not mistaken, I counted 35 different countries, many with multiple cities within them as destinations. That is 1/5 of the world’s countries, pretty impressive for a few hours’ span, I must say. Not quite the Departures board that I saw leaving the newly renovated Rick Husband International (yes, indeed) Amarillo Airport. And yet, sitting here at Starbucks, listening to Roy, from Wink, Texas, it is really hard to even begin to comprehend where I will be tomorrow morning. I feel rather like I am in a shopping mall somewhere in the US Midwest, like Nebraska or something. Very difficult to get in the mood at the moment in all honesty. And yet, it is a strange feeling.

But, such is life. We find ourselves in situations all of the time that we never expected, nor hope to be in, for better and for worse. As I get older, (and much grayer as my daughter likes to point out), I realize that it is nearly worthless to come to the table with many expectations of the future. Now, that is not as fatalistic, nor pessimistic as it may seem, but rather, really, just the way it seems to be. What unfolds before us is seldom, if ever what we imagine in our heads, and again, for better or for worse.

I had a conversation last evening with a very dear friend about the difficulty of “living in the present” and she recalled the quote from Kung Fu Panda about the here and now being a gift, which is why it is called the “present.” I have heard that said in a variety of contexts, but I must say, Jack Black’s Panda receiving this wisdom from his Master is as good as any I know to keep in mind.

The quality of the present is so precious and yet, seemingly so damn elusive at times. To actually stay in the present that is given to us is incredibly hard for we are just as apt to slip into the memories of the past as the expectations of the future, and all the while, as the saying goes, our lives are passing right before our eyes. Maybe that’s why I really like to listen to music, as it can really get me in the present.

Of course, music can also remind us of the past, or get us excited about the future. I cannot tell you how many times I listened to KISS Alive II on my Sony Walkman (!!!!) before swim races. I would listen to Gene, Paul, Peter, and Ace belt it out and get totally, radically fired up, dude before my race, in the future. I had an amazing knack for being able to “visualize” my future race, down to the tenth of a second most of the time, and then go do that swim. But, that seems to be the extent of my ability to predict the future correctly.

But, back to the music in the present. When it is not reminding me of the past, or prompting me to think about the future, I really feel “in the present” when I am listening to music. Like Eminem, I “lose myself” in the music, but there is the irony. When I lose myself into the music, it begs the question, “from what?” What I am losing from? Maybe it is Time itself, or from Me.

I think what has probably become clear in my blogs is that although I am anything but a musician, music is absolutely crucial to my life. Besides loved ones, and of course daily sustenance, if I had to say that there was one thing that I would miss most in life if it were suddenly gone, I believe that it would be music. If you have seen the movie, Immortal Beloved with Gary Oldman as Beethoven, I believe that film captures the essence of that special bond with have with music. The scene in which the Master is “listening” to his 9th Symphony being performed is truly moving. Oldman nails it. With that scene, the music that is in Beethoven’s head dissolves Space and Time and he is completely on another plane of existence. He is completely and utterly alone with his music, as he can only “hear” it in his head, now being deaf.

I know that many people have written much more eloquently about Time, including St. Augustine, Heidegger, and Hawking, inter alia, but it is a compelling subject to go back to, again and again for me.

One of the questions that I have been thinking about lately, however, is the relationship between feelings and Time. Can we feel more than one emotion at any given Time? Earlier today I experienced a mixture of feelings and emotions for a variety of reasons dealing with my departure from Belgium. What I noticed was that I would feel a mosaic of these feelings, alternating quite quickly, but each one of them had to make space for the other emotion. Each one demanded being only in the present to be experienced. At some point, I seemed to be stepping away from all of them and actually choosing which one I wanted to be feeling, which felt rather awe-some, in the sense of striking awe into me, rather than the surfer dude version.

However, now that I am sitting here, listening to some horrible piped in Jazz and Lounge Music (Roy, why did you leave me?), I am not able to choose an emotion that is not here, present because there is no stimulus. Rather, strangely, I feel no-thing. And, what I am trying to puzzle through with this rambling is, “is that a bad thing?” The joke runs, “Q: What is the difference between ignorance and indifference? A: I don’t know and I don’t care.” Kant says that to truly view something as beautiful, it takes a state of pure indifference, no judgment, no prejudice whatsoever. In other words, to experience something in a pure state, we need to step out of Time, out of Emotion, and just observe it, with indifference. Krishnamurti says the same thing about being alone. To truly be alone means to step out of the moment and to observe ourselves being alone and not be upset by it, but just to really look at it, experience it, be it.

Maybe that is what I feel at this moment. Not lonely, like poor ol’ Roy sings about often, because I can readily think about those whom I love dearly and picture them quite vividly and feel all warm and fuzzy, and yet, there is an overwhelmingly calm feeling in this serenity as I am really, truly, and indifferently alone here in the terminal.