When one adds “-ness” to a word, what does it mean? Is it the character of that thing over time? Oneness – the being of singularity, as experienced over a series of moments. Thingness – the quality of being a thing, really a thing. Belongingness – being part of something that fits and stays with you. Aloneness – being by oneself. Loneliness – feeling by oneself, not a part of something. It has been suggested to me that belongingness can be combined with aloneness, and I believe this. I believe I have experienced this, particularly when I have seen the thingness of the small things that I do, of the things in my life. When I’ve watched my house plants very carefully, daily, taking in their states of being and hydration levels. When I’ve recognized my aloneness and thought, this has a oneness to it. Writing that brings me back to the feeling of satisfied aloneness, a synonym for belongingness. It’s 91 degrees and humid in Madison, Wisconsin. I’m under an awning whose shadiness is supporting the possibility of being outside at this mid-afternoon scorch. I’m looking around at fuzzes flying around from milkweed or another flying seeding plant. My body is satisfied that it has been fed sufficiently, but it wouldn’t fight me if I gave it a nap. But not yet. There are words to be written.
Here are more of those words: when I feel uncomfortable, the key is not to comfort myself. The key is to feel the discomfort more deeply, to find its origin, to work my way into its genealogy. It’s part of the reason I’m enjoying this stifling heat so much. I feel what might be discomfort, but then I breathe deep and listen to the birds lazily tittering from time to time. I watch a jet fly over. I feel my toes gripping my sandal as it threatens to fall off my crossed feet. I taste the tonic water and espresso as they work their way around my tongue, my teeth, my esophagus. And I feel my skin sticking to my shirt as one of the fuzzy seedlings sticks to my neck. My sore fingers. And then I breathe deep again and the heat feels like water, and I drink. The water is hydrating me, the heat is making its way through me. I am of the heat on this sauna day.
I’ve thought about the arm wrestling match between free will and determinism after hearing a couple people talk about the dichotomy to end and start all dichotomies. The thought was that both are the truth, that free will is wielded and determinism is the fact of the matter, and that one ought to bounce back and forth between believing in one of the other depending on the situation. This feels like it could be a powerful tool for re-narrating a crappy story. And yet it feels like another brick in the wall around the One True Self. I’d like to tear that wall down and let the flock of thousands of ducks that have been behind those walls, with the netting over the top, fly away. These ducks that made up the One True Self (OTS) are not of the same type. There are mandarins, mallards, and wood ducks. There are even loons and geese that appear to have snuck in there (one never knows with “evolution”). Rather than a single OTS, the life of the ducks that had appeared to exhibit a single, unified quack is multiplicitous. The threads of the OTS are actually separate, different shades of new colors. So free will is absurd because all these fowl are doing their own thing. They don’t even flock together when the walls and netting are down. Determinism would be an impossible thing to trace, were it true. Each one of these birds does whatever it does, and trying to do the math to add up each of their desires, paths, and quacks to identify the mechanistic universe at work would be the work of pushing sand up a hill, and Sisyphus at least had a One True Rock to push up that hill.
So how does one belong to that flock, finding belongingness? One certainly isn’t alone in it. That’s a lot of birds.
Roman Ryan 