After the first weeks culling my work back and sitting home an anxious mess, I began to work a little. Sourcing products on Thursday and Friday, prepping on Saturday and Sunday, Making orders and delivery on Monday- Wednesday. It didn’t fill the day but it kept me busy and gave me a little purpose. Buy and large I feel like I “work” a lot of time alone, running in circles to keep moving. One part “work”, 99 parts mental necessity. A man in motion may have time to think, but a man on his ass has time to dwell, and dwelling isn’t great. It’s been during this thinking time that I have come to realize how much we depend on others to truly be alone.

I grew up an only child. I mean I had three half siblings, but they lived at the least 1000 miles away. I may not see them for years at a stretch, so I grew up alone a lot. There were times I remember hating it, but now I think it manifests in a need to be away from the crowd. I love popping in and out, but I have always felt like I lived on the periphery of the groups I was in. Even if I started them.

Living on the periphery is easier really. Full immersion is a commitment and that commitment has costs. Well, it seems like that’s the write thing to type anyway. What it has yielded is a large group of friends from the last 40+ years and an ability to morph to a lot of situations. Living on the periphery also has costs as it feels a lot like not “belonging” to anything completely except yourself.

This pandemic solitude is probably tough on a lot of people. People used to being and needing others to be around all of the time. I feel like I cheated the pandemic so far because like I said, after the first couple of weeks, I went back to being me, just at a lower volume. Maybe this is why I started to become less concerned with how things were going to come out on the other side, because they feel the same. This is also telling of the level of stress and unknown, owning a restaurant is as well as my mental state in general. Maybe the latter just prepared me for this. Feels that way.

I think the real point of this is that a lot of people are learning to live with a degree of solitude they never experienced before. I am sure people are struggling with that a lot. I also think people who are used to being alone are finding they never realized how much they needed people to realize they were alone. You can’t know the absence of something without that something. Clear as mud.

As we all reenter the world like a bunch of dirty moths emerging from suburban cocoons a lot of people are going to be noticing that craving for interaction has lessened, that bigger groups, the thing we’ve been “missing” are going to be more jarring than we anticipate. The art of ghosting out of a situation will become something you learn, and I think the situations people think they want are going to change.

I keep coming back to one word. Less.

Less everything.

The world has contracted a bit, and you can now feel a little bit like an only child. Sorry, but you can’t just get your way all the time, you have to be born into that.

#hugsandhi5s