What constitutes happiness? During solo travel in a van, everything is more pronounced. You are locked into your mind and notice its migration from one state to another. The gift of other people is that they offset your aloneness. Happiness exists in the energy of exchange. It manifests as a gift, as the by-product of this interplay. It's easy to skip over this realisation in city life. You protect your space and take "your receiving" for granted. As this journey begins, I feel deeply this rupture from people. It is to be expected; Easter with my family was one of my happiest times. And it's amplified by a breakup. Grief is a passenger. You see someone who was there, not there. Witnessing small things, but no longer shared. Daily rituals are impregnated with meaning through kinship. We laud love, but really it is the subtlest thing. Chris McCandless understood this realisation sadly at his end: "Happiness is only real when shared". Yet equally, we have made a false god of happiness. We resist the idea that happiness must be earned. It is why love is so intoxicating. To feel happiness as pure interplay and exchange with another. And what a wonder it is! It feels as if a native state. That is how things should be. And for a moment, we forget the essential nature of the universe; cold, desolate and knitted together through light-year upon light-year of separation. Writing "The Isolation Diaries" blessed me with intermingling profound solitude with a time of love. They were never mutually exclusive. If anything, they brought one another out more fully. Love and solitude must be understood as a package. Whether we are in a relationship or not. Many people have a fanciful notion of solitude. Going to a cafe to write in your diary. A short walk. Yet I think we need a deeper relationship it. If it doesn't make you slightly uncomfortable, you're not really in the spirit of solitude. When I travel solo, I am spending time within my native state. The hard edge is that it is not "happiness". I resist deeply acknowledging this. It arrives as a form of torment. It brings questioning, self-doubt and resistance. That who I want to be grates violently against that which I am. "Why are you bloody well doing this to yourself, man? What are you trying to prove? And to whom?" The demon's voice awakens when we give it time. Which is precisely why the world organises itself through distraction. Busyness as distraction. Business as distraction. Apps as distraction. People as distraction. Outrage as distraction. Identity as distraction. Even love, as distraction. We don't spend time alone because it is awful to realise you are unhappy. But this is the illusion: That our basic state should be happiness. It is a drug we are weaned onto early. We don't develop the capacity to exist outside happiness. In confronting reality we fragment. And take our anger out on the world, society, and those around us - anything other than ourselves.
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