Someone To Wave To

“I fucking hate people.” Julia Roberts’ character expresses this sentiment at the start of the recent Netflix blockbuster Leave The World Behind. This made me laugh out loud because I often find myself saying the same thing during my eternal “time of the month.”

The thing is that I don’t hate people, not even a little. I don’t even hate the people I think I hate. I really do believe in my heart that we’re all just doing our best and sometimes we just don’t have the capacity to recognize that in each other, or even in ourselves. 

This blog is about loneliness, change, and death––things most of us would prefer to avoid thinking or talking about, but things that none of us can ever avoid experiencing. So, in the spirit of the holidays, let’s rattle some bones and talk about it? 

Or this can be where you take your exit…

As I set out for my morning bicycle ride the other day, I commented to a friend that the man we’d just passed and said hello to was “just someone I wave to.” My friend smiled and chuckled; he knew exactly what I meant.

One of the things I love most about that morning bicycle ride is the people. I usually set out alone, or with said friend, Alan, just before sunrise, and along the way are all “my” regulars, the people I wave and say hello to.

I love this ordinary routine event. There’s the guy on my road who does his slow-paced walk while windmilling his arms. We wave to each other as I pass. If I don’t notice his wave right away, he comes out into the middle of the road and flails his arms at me. I don’t know why, but I know it feels nice to have someone to wave to, and those mornings I don’t see that guy I wonder where he is.

There are the two older Thai men dressed in their brown or blue woolen sweater vests and ball caps, who give me a lazy arm flap as I pass them on the bike path. It’s like we’ve known each other for years, but our only thing in common is that specific spot on the bike path at a specific time of day for the past 2 years or so. I’m not sure I’d recognize them anywhere else at any other time.

There’s the Japanese couple doing their routine float-like stroll in the forest. Their hello comes in the form of taking my photo as I cycle by (they’ve even given me an SD card on occasion with copies of the photos).

There’s the pretty lady with her bouncy ponytail and purple pants getting her morning power walk on. I holler “prEE-ow” as I pass, which means “sexy lady” in Thai, and she gives me a big, sexy smile. And there are many other familiar faces––they’re all someone to wave to.

Now I have lots of good people in my life. I don’t feel lonely in any threatening way, yet I feel so grateful for all those someones each day I venture out engage in that two-second I-notice-you-and-you-notice-me interaction. And I wonder about all the people who are really, truly alone, or who really, truly feel alone, who could do with a few more someones to wave to.

Especially since I read this:

“Being lonely is as dangerous to your health as smoking half a pack of cigarettes a day.” (source).

Obviously loneliness is a different kind of dangerous than long-term smoking, but when we’re talking about health and things to be afraid of, the ultimate danger is death, and there’s really only one kind––once you’re dead, you’re dead. At least, as far as I know.

While I’m not sure that I fear death, I do often resist change––I think many of us do. And death and change are kind of the same thing. Through several years of practicing meditation, learning a lot from teachers of Buddhism, and one profound experience with 5-MeO-DMT, I’ve come to realize and experience that death happens all the time, moment to moment, in myriad little ways. 

It’s at the end of every exhale. 

It’s in the ticking of the clock and the sinking into sleep each night. 

It’s in the strands of hair I vacuum up, the fingernails I trim, the withered plant on my balcony that didn’t make it. 

It’s at the end of friendships and the bottom of my coffee cup. 

It’s every time we say goodbye to someone we love. 

It’s every time we say hello to someone we love, when we close the gap and stop believing for a moment that we’re separate.

It’s the continuous shedding of skin cells and the reason why washing the bedsheets at least once a week is a good practice. 

They say that all of our cells are replaced every 180 days. If that’s the case, if everything is dying all the time, then what is really true? 

That question comes from Sogyal Rinpoche, a Tibetan Dzogchen Lama. It both gives me the chills and opens my eyes to what really matters, which, paradoxically, is nothing as much as it is everything.

Quitting smoking matters, I’ve learned that. So too does having people in our life with which there is healthy reciprocity. I don’t believe a thick-and-thin history is required, nor is a lifelong commitment to unconditional love and support, if there is such a thing anyways. 

But I do believe that having someone to say hello to every day is vital for survival, even if that person is “just” the security dude in our building, the woman at the local cafe, or the guy keeping his rotator cuffs in good working order at 6 a.m. Even if we don’t know that person’s name or where they’re from or if they’re happy in their lives. 

We just need to notice someone other than ourselves, and for someone to notice us, too.

Maybe this is why the holidays are so hard for people. Why the sound of Christmas music makes some people cringe or the mention of a festive dinner is so appalling. Maybe it’s because we’re all a few shades of lonely and we’ve haven’t got any idea that it could be any other way.

Maybe it’s because we’ve adapted to loneliness as a way of life. And we don’t even know we’re lonely in the same way a committed smoker doesn’t realize they feel like shit because it’s so integrated into the everyday. 

Maybe it’s because we believe we’re separate.

Maybe it’s why having someone to wave to feels so nice.

And here’s the thing––maybe we’re afraid of doing something about our loneliness, if we recognize it for what it is, because change is death. Even if something is uncomfortable or toxic, it’s familiar, we still get a certain kind of comfort and security in what we know, in things staying the same. In the old, static story flickering in the dark while we drift off to sleep.

So, we know loneliness. Every single human being knows loneliness. Even plants know loneliness. The plants I group into families thrive compared to the plants I’ve placed singularly next to the window because I thought there was only room for one. 

We might find some temporary relief from loneliness in a cigarette, in a bottomless glass of wine, in another personal drama, in a refrigerator, or in a mini owl ornament. But loneliness will always sneak its way back in and settle its familiar hollow warmth back into our bones if we believe that I am not you and you are not me and we are not each other. If we believe our neighbour is just some guy out for a walk.

And the more regularly we dig our heels into that loneliness by doing our usual separate things and thinking our usual separate thoughts, the less likely we will be to take the uncomfortable risks that open us up to connection with others. Sometimes that uncomfortable risk is loving from a distance so we can stop the up-close-and-personal aggression. Other times it is building a necessary bridge. So many times it’s just saying hello and waving to a stranger.

I’d love that even if only for a season celebrated mostly for its gaudy commercialism, we could drop the idea that we fucking hate people when actually, we’re all dying to love a little more.

Imagine all the people I claim, you claim, we claim to fucking hate “living for today, living life in peace, sharing all the world…”

Happy Christmas 👋🏽