Musings from magnificent isolation and other pontificating, hypocritical rants

After months of living in a cycle of dissertation-writing-discipline that required, for me and my work-process, avoiding too much socialising—both in real life or on Skype—for some reason I chose to spend my celebratory holiday on an island that feels somewhat like the edge of the world, the closest village a 15 minute walk away from my lodgings, with a total of 30 year-round residents:

The closest village: Soline

Soline, Dugi Otok, Croatia

Here, on Dugi Otok, off-season officially began the week I arrived. With a practically empty ferry ride from Zadar, an island shuttle bus run for me and three senior citizens who live here and which dropped me off on the side of a small highway, a subtle excitement of finally being entirely alone began to bubble up. Boris, my airbnb host in his 1970s pristine white Mercedes Benz, found me on the side of the highway and drove me down the steep, red earth white-stony drive-way to the apartments on the water:

The terrace of Boris and Edita's beautiful, self-built apartments

Boris and his wife, Edita, tell me there are no other guests and will be alone the next 7 days and also that I am indeed the last guest of the entire season. My subtle excitement about being alone exploded into a full sigh of relief as, upon leaving Budapest for this trip, I feel I have just been trying to get somewhere where there are no other people. And I found it:

Why this urge, nay urgency, to be in magnificent isolation after months of isolating work? This is an interesting question. I wasn’t sure I understood it upon arriving here and questioned whether it was actually a ‘healthy’ urge. Or if it was a ‘bad’ urge; a red flag signalling the start of my path to giving up on human interactions, opting instead for animal pals:

My work buddy

My re-incarnated buddy-- I accidentally killed one of these beautiful creatures earlier this year and was so glad to have the chance to see another one

My little begging cooking buddy-- a bit of a bully to the other cats but we love him anyway

My snail buddy, Fibbo.

This island during off-season is not for the faint of heart, the lonely, the needy, the picky, the easily bored, or the gluten-intolerant (both physiologically intolerant and spiritually intolerant). But something magical and healing happens in the absence of other people, if one lets it. In the absence of other humans with which to refer myself,  I am reminded of what I am: so much bigger than what I look like, what I wear, what I ‘do’, what religion or political party or activist organisation I may or may not align with, who I have relationships with, how old I am, who does things better than me, and who does things worse than me, and all the ways I bound my identity up so that I can feel like I “fit” in with my referential social group.

Western societies (and increasingly all societies) have moved away from ensuring people feel they have a place in it and the wealth of social support conferred from being born into your community is dwindling drastically.  Because of this, I believe insecurity about not “fitting” in or having a sure place in our communities, has to be assuaged through other means, including but not limited to: religious fantasies, hating people that believe in different religious fantasies than our own fantasies, hating people that have a ‘look’ that challenges the ‘look’ of the lingering supremacy of Euro colonial powers, 100,000 dollar white weddings, granite counter tops, baskets full of half used beauty products accumulated in the search for the one that will finally "work", to climb higher, run further, become America’s top masterchef, have more letters after our names, etc.

 

When out here, seated among the soothing sounds and brilliance of nature’s perfect pitch and palette, respectively, away from other fucked up human egos, my own ego seems to dissolve and I can just be, with no feelings of whether I “fit” or not. And this, my friends, is pretty addicting...especially when I’ve always felt I live on the outside, looking in (much to my relief most of the time). 

In the last month or so of writing, I found myself saying out loud: “I just want to stop”. I didn’t mean quit. I didn’t mean die (although then I wouldn’t have to deal with this PhD thing and would likely have a nice memorial service at which people would say things like: “she was so full of life!” or “she had so much potential, gone too soon!”).

I just meant I wanted to have a number of sequential days where I did not feel any obligation to “do” anything. But “doing” is also part of our little mind’s construction of how we think we are supposed to live our lives. It’s the result of frantic insecurity about the future, in my opinion, which is most definitely a result of the insecurity of the societies we have managed to create (scarcity mindset) coupled with our lizard brains. Must. Not. Stop. Or.Else. I. Will. Be. Left. Behind. I am of course guilty of this. Doing a PhD can easily lead someone to slip into this mindset where vacation/doing nothing=career death. This is wee bit narcissistic on the part of academics as I’m sure there will be no massive emergencies where someone will need me to urgently devise a theoretical framework and conduct a literature review.

Having embedded a certain amount of discipline into my life the past many years, it takes a conscious effort to STOP, to find flexibility among the rigidity. The second day here, I made a schedule for myself, on paper, with times and things...like I would do on a typical work day. I scheduled in wake up, breakfast, reading, writing, and other reflective time. And then I guffawed and scribbled it out. And that night I turned off my alarm and let myself sleep until I wasn’t sleeping anymore. On another occasion this past week, I tried to schedule an “impulse” day, where I would just do whatever the hell I felt like doing as it dawned on me. And then realised that that was the day I had to go to grocery store and also I had a Skype date with a friend...so I found myself rescheduling impulse day to be the next day, completely aware of the irony.

This does not mean I laid around all day for a week, to be sure.  Mostly I sat in my swinging chair on the water. I read three wonderful  pieces of literature, one by an acclaimed British authoress, one by my beloved compatriot Margaret Atwood, and one by another compatriot, a celebrated Hungarian master from the early 20^th century. All of them presenting the quiet resolution and fear of freedom that comes after the uncertain storm of youth, passion, and power.  

I also went for runs along the coast, drinking in the humid wafts of wildly growing curry plants and lavendar:

Jumped across coastal rocks and explored, and got lost in, olive groves:

Sat on the beach with beers, the Adriatic sea water drying in a salty layer on my skin that was so thick I was afraid the British might try to colonise me:

Sakarun beach

One afternoon I spent 1.5 hours cutting split ends out of the right side of my hair and the next day I spent another 2 hours cutting split ends out of the left side. After this, I decided this was a sysiphean task and I would get a haircut by a professional before I defend my dissertation next year sometime.  

I watched fiery sunrises over the water, the Monet-esque reflections in the ripples:

I spent a lot of time staring into the crystal clear water at the sea urchins littering the sea floor, schools of interesting fish, starfish, and watched a tumultuous flock of cormorants morph into one coherent organism and brightly coloured kingfishers skimming the water’s surface seeking out their breakfasts. 

One afternoon, as I sat down on my water-adjacent swinging bench with a coffee and a book, I was rudely interrupted by an unfamiliar sound which happened to be an Adriatic dolphin. I listened to my friend “Dolphy” have a conversation with the sea wall in his little dolphin language (we have that capacity in common, the ability to talk to walls) and I watched him frolic alone in the bay for almost two hours, obviously he was also in need of some “special time” away from his pod:

My Dolphy

If we can stop “doing”, put down the phone, take the ear buds out of the ears, look up, and sit in silence, shy nature reveals itself to us and reminds us we are not alone even in the absence of other humans. And we fit.

On one of my morning runs, after having watched the sunrise from my waterfront swinging-bench and having transitioned from the silent darkness into wakefulness along with the birds and the fish, I noticed I was running towards the setting full moon (well, 97% full...I googled it) while at the same time, behind me, the sun was rising. Not only did I, for a moment, imagine that we lived on a mobile of the planetary system made of styrofoam balls and coat hangers created by a very large elementary school child for a science fair, but so too did it vividly remind me of the larger cycles of our insignificant planet and, by default,  the insignificance of the minutae of our lives; it reminded me of the bigger picture which, paradoxically, gives me great comfort.

I wanted to stare at the big clear full moon in broad daylight and its shady continent-like forms but because I was running on such a stony pathway, I needed to keep my gaze focused downwards so as not to break an ankle:

Running trail... here is where I saw the moonset but not in this picture...who takes a camera when they run???

I could have chosen to stop and stand there, and look up at it. But for some reason, I didn’t. I was compelled to keep moving, running, exercising. Most of us, I think, go through life looking down at the path in front of us for where to land our feet, navigating the stones that are thrown our way, so as not to break our ankles. I think this is when we start to forget the bigger picture that can help remind us of the ultimate insignificance of our successes and failures at an individual level and at the larger level of humanity... the insignificance of our tangible successes and failures in the 7,000th (approx.) year of the 20,000 year cycle of the earth's orbit's wobble that will lead, again, back to a green Sahara, that sits on great reserves of million-year old fossilised water, for example.

Writing a dissertation is like having your head down for months and months, unceasingly, engulfed in “deep” thinking, existing only in your head, your body only useful as a vehicle to move your head around from the kitchen to the bathroom to the bedroom. The world looks narrow and small here. Narrow perspectives lead to narrow and small-minded responses to life’s waves. 

 
Thus it was a week of magnificent isolation, sitting in silence among my little earth buddies, and being reminded of my place on the earth, in the galaxy, and in the universe...comforted by my own irrelevance but also my expansiveness. I will try to hold this with me as I move from this world of abundant living (yes even without humans!!) back into, what sometimes seems like, the sad world of the dying. This, I hope can continue to be the foundation for my worldview as I try to play 'the game', to a certain extent, to avoid eating cat food as an old lady, basically.