The Radical Act of Being Present

What's the difference between alone and lonely? Navneet Bhullar ponders the possibilities.

I am taking a picture of the brass plaque aglow in twilight on the facade of a multi-storey building by the main square downtown. The plaque says: “First troops to answer President Abraham Lincoln’s call to arms for the Civil War were mustered here.”

An overweight man emerges through the heavy door of this imposing building with a shopping cart. His right hand trembles constantly, a sign to my clinically trained eyes, of a side effect of anti-psychotics, treatment for psychiatric illnesses of different kinds. I greet the man.

I did not know that this is a historic building, I say to explain my presence outside his building door. He tells me that this is public housing. I see a grandly curtained room behind large glass windows to my right. I ask if they eat in this dining room. No, the residents each have small living rooms and kitchens in their apartments he informs me. Why this dining room then, I wonder aloud.

If we want to have people over for a gathering, such as friends and family, we can use the room but we have to get permission. And pay thirty dollars or something, the man answers, poker faced.

  He lingers to keep chatting. We part. I head home. We had been the only people on this street. The town square is bereft of any living thing excepting the bright spring flowers in tall cement troughs.

At home, as I eat alone after a successful writing sprint, Sheila Liming is speaking on public radio about her book Hanging Out: the Radical Power of Killing Time.

  She talks of a sociological concept of the third space where people can hang out to meet others outside their home and work lives. In American culture, just hanging out with no agenda is tinged in guilt. Public parks, town squares, libraries, coffee houses, bars, even grocery stores serve as third spaces. The two poles of solitude are alluded to in the book – one sought by the privileged and the other as punishment. I wonder whether that ornate dining room in the historic building I saw today is ever used. These people, whom society has shoved to the periphery, are made to pay to gather friends for a party.

I imagine the man with the shopping cart walking to the grocery store to hang out after we parted. On some days, in my own promenades around this little town, I pass men in wheelchairs, talking or watching the sparse traffic quietly. I sometimes stop to briefly chat. Once I complained to the men that there is no shop to buy croissants in town. They told me there was a lady who delivers home made croissants. I ate her croissants that week alone.

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Liming, the writer on radio, goes on to talk of parties. She tells us that she once had a party where no one showed up. Some years back when living in a large city, I too hosted a dinner where just two of the five persons invited showed up. Both single women. The other three were a couple and a long distance partnered woman friend. Liming says that a party can be seen as a radical act as it initiates physical proximity which is getting less and less, and that food is the least important ingredient of a good party. I knew that.

On a spring long weekend, I walked on a river trail not far from my downtown apartment. People dragged up their boats and kayaks after a day on the water with family or partners. I was pacing the trail alone, in low spirits, thinking of my father who had passed away last year. The smell of jasmine, a childhood flower, farther down the trail heightened my loss.

On a bench on this river trail, under a tree, a man sat, his upper torso folded on his lap, head down. A red bicycle stood next to his bench. He was still there in this same position when I was heading back up the trail some minutes later. I asked him how he was. I touched him with his daypack when he did not respond. I am OK, just napping, he said, head still on lap as children’s squeals by the river muffled his words. Solitude’s sad pole.

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Years ago, more than one French colleague in an international NGO told me about their experience of work life in New York. Americans are outwardly friendly but after work, one is on one’s own. An Armenian told me she did not want to live in the US as “they live like robots.” Solitude here in the US is a privilege which feeds productivity till it does not. Fenton Johnson says in a Harper’s magazine essay: “Solitude imposes on its practitioners a choice between emotional atrophy and openness to the world, with all the reward and heartbreak that generosity implies.”

  I have heard about a 74-year-old woman in Holland whose body was discovered10 years after she died. By the gas engineer who accessed the apartment for his job. We know about the Ministry of Loneliness in the UK, of former US surgeon general Vivek Murthy’s advocacy on the loneliness epidemic. Enforced solitude can be lethal to the spirits and to use a slogan from the World Health Organization, there is no health without mental health.

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My mother passed away suddenly while we were still grieving my father’s loss less than two years prior. I had often complained to Mum how, while staying in her home supporting her in illness, I was missing solitude to write. Now I sit with excessive solitude in hand, mum’s presence gone. I just sit at my desk to read and write. I received condolence messages, frequent messages for check-ins, and cute sad dog photos from one writer friend. I was to stay overnight in her city’s suburb during a visit there recently. I told her we could meet. I was in her area six hours before bedtime. She chose to attend her daughter’s lacrosse games. I took the train to my former library to chat with their staff, and check the room which had sold books for a quarter or less when I left the area some years ago, then ate at a sandwich place close by. Alone. The writer at lacrosse never asked when I would be back. It was a train journey I had broken in her city (and my former hometown) on my way to attend a conference and she knew it. She was among the two who had not attended that aforementioned dinner party of mine years ago. At that time she was twenty minutes drive from my home, a shorter drive now from the sandwich shop where I was eating. Months before my mother’s passing, there was a writer’s event I registered for and told this writer friend about. I wished to attend it with her. She is unemployed. She did not show up then citing a teenage daughter’s lacrosse game then as well. I am done with her now. The end of a friendship that was really not one.

I wrote this little manifesto to send to her if she contacts me, a pact for friendships.

“Showing up is vital to a friendship. I will make an effort to meet the person I call a friend when I can. Social media is not for cultivating friendships, or myself for that matter. It is a capitalist tool which fertilizes all that is toxic about individualism as a sub-creed of capitalism. It is also known as narcissism and is literally cutting short lifespans. Messaging on phone is for simple communication. I recognize this: messaging does not replace your physical presence. When you can drive under one hour or (better) take the train or bus for little longer, do it. Presence is the minimum requirement for a relationship. Write this down somewhere as a mausoleum to our friendship. When someone loses a beloved parent, or partner, or child, or yes a friend, they need to be sat with and talked with, not sent silly photos on social media or messaging apps.”

Visiting Oaxaca city in Mexico last year, I met two American women one evening in an art gallery where there was a roomful of art by prisoners. The women, a realtor and a social worker from different US states, had been living in this town for some months. They wanted to know me more, to show me the city’s oldest cantina down the road and then perhaps we could all go dancing one of them suggested. In my photograph of the evening, the realtor holds a big dog in her lap, her drink glistening on the table. A male friend had left the dog to her care. I was sad to leave this ebullient duo to take the planned bus out of town that night- Americans who wanted to just hang out with a stranger from their land. I lingered. I barely made it to the bus.

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Navneet Bhullar is a physician, climate activist and writer who has lived between central Pennsylvania and Indian Punjab via central Asia, sub-Saharan Africa, and south-east Asia in her work as a doctor with an international NGO. Her poems and essays have been published in Cagibi, Otherwise magazine, The Bombay Literary Magazine, The Harvard Primary Care Review, Peregrine and elsewhere. She has founded a disability NGO in India and is currently at work on her memoir in essays on caregiving. 

Images:

Park by Molly Blackbird

Talk by Yunming Wang