Alone and together. Happy and sad. With cats. The cats change everything. I am alone and never alone. I suppose if they begin talking back instead of squeaking and murmuring it would be time to check with my psychiatrist. I am alone. I am also filled to the brim with my own joy and creative bloom.
Am I in some paradox?
My happiness is not dependent on having a partner. I’d like one. I’d like an aspirational realtionship this time where both of us are striving to improve, to grow, stretch, remain flexible and empathetic. Often, in loving partnerships, things go south. One or both of the partners begin to shift away from their initial infatuation and enmeshment.
Yes, my ex-girlfriend was my “best friend” for nearly three years. Now, not. Is she still a best friend? Yes. Is she a best friend I want to hang out with or chat with. Also, yes, but prohibited behavior. Love is a slippery slope. I don’t want to light fires that were difficult to manage and painful to extinguish. I know forward is the path. The world around me is singing with disaster (CA fires, 2025 incoming administration) and as REM sang, “It’s the end of the world as we know it, and I feel fine.”
I do. I am. Happiness is my mojo. Inner joy warms my bloodstream to just over normal temps. I run a bit hot. And right now, this period of my life, with so much uncertainty, I am still in a state of bliss. Or, as I’ve imagined before, I’ve slipped over the edge into a euphoric psychotic break.
Multiple states simultaneously. Happy = Alone.
Okay, the cats have definitely not been factored into that formula. But, I was rather liminal before the cats as well.
Leaving a loving relationship is hard. But it wasn’t divorce hard. It wasn’t losing 70% of my kid-time hard. It was “I’m so sorry to disappoint you” hard. I feel no guilt or regret. I can still miss the hand, miss the chats, miss the best friend part. Okay, time to seek a new best friend. Or, better yet, not seek. BE.
I am in the process of being my own best friend again. Rather than charge after some mega-fit-creative-kissing partner, I am recultivating my inner conversations, my inner joys, my craft (reading, writing, exploring inner space). I am both alone and not alone.
A god thing? I’m not sure. A cat thing? Yes. A John thing? Also, yes.
It goes back to the entertainment issue. We all want to be entertained. We all tend to get bored when excitement is not ginned up and sought after. The Friday night feeling of “what are we going to do?”
In a human relationship that question adds “together.” In a cat-only relationship my options are limited only by my energy and motivation. It’s when things slip one way or another in a human partnership, where one person does the “entertainment” and the other person simply shows up. One-sided love affairs usually turn sour quickly. I’m not complaining. But, it does point to a dilemma I’m wresting on the horns of. If I am a writer, and writers need to be alone to write, do I need to be in a relationship with another creative person who’s not always looking to me for entertainment? Someone who generates their own entertainment?
Ah, and that’s my own blind side. As the observer of myself, I don’t have the proper perspective. I know I flood and overwhelm. I’m getting better at putting monologues in my writing and doing less of it in my human interactions. I have to regulate myself. A dear friend gave me a large glass hourglass. He’s one of my most connected friends, in fact I’ll see him tonight, maybe I’ll take the hourglass. His joke and practical information is a symbol of balancing the time in a conversation. Learning to listen as much as talk.
I’m sort of sick of my own storytelling. I was sick of trying to find the movie, the concert, the restaurant. I cannot be on the hook for anyone else’s happiness except my cats. And the cats do not mind my soliloquies. They only get concerned when the food dish is empty or any motion toward the kitchen where they might procure, with much fussing, another squirt of goo, cat topper, dessert, whatever it is, it’s crack cocaine to my cats and they are addicts. The cacophony when they follow me into the kitchen is fun, ridiculous, and a bit like two beings that 100% dependent on me for their supply.
I can’t be that for another human. Your supply of happiness is limited only by your inner-serenity and self-awareness. Alone, the awareness part comes pretty fast. “What do you/I want to do tonight?”
Here’s the tell: are you excited about Saturday night? Alone? When the answer is yes, you have arrived at the mixed liminal state of happiness and loneliness all at once. Here. Happy. Here lonely.
Key Points:
- In quantum mechanics, particles can be in several states at once
- The system exists in all possible states simultaneously
- When measured, the system “collapses” into one definite state
- Often illustrated by the famous Schrödinger’s cat thought experiment, where a cat in a sealed box is theoretically both alive and dead until the box is opened
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