Existential Penguin

I just finished ANOTHER article about how hard it is to make mom friends (or friends as an adult, or friends at all take your pick) and not to state the obvious or anything, but it seems to me that if we’re all so frickin’ lonely we should like, go get coffee or something. I’m not saying that I’m not guilty of it, please,  I created an entire blog that is (apparently) dedicated to how lonely I feel sometimes often less-often-than-I-did-a-year-ago. But that’s kind of my point. Look how many of us their are – and how many of us are saying the same thing – shouldn’t there be a way to connect with these like-minded, lonely souls? So what’s the issue? I’m not entirely sure what’s going on with everyone else, but I think I’m too busy to make new friends. And that’s odd, because I’m not sure how I have time to be lonely and bored but not time to make friends.

Since I realized how strange it is to be lonely and busy at the same time I’ve been forcing myself to take the time to try to make friends. I’ve been reaching out to my old acquaintances who are still in the area who have kids, trying to see if we have anything in common to reconnect with. I’ve been trying to make sure to take time to connect with the few local friends I do have, and I’ve just joined a mom’s group. We’ve had 1 meeting so far, which wasn’t spectacular, but I’m committed to giving it some time.

I’m still concerned though about the actual phenomenon though.  Mostly my concerns stem from the question “what’s driving this?” Are we really more lonely now then we have been in the past or are we just talking about it more openly? And if we are more lonely now, why is that? Is loneliness just a mental game of keeping up with the Jones’s? Are we over-estimating the amount of friends others have and thus perceiving a lack in our own social circles (perhaps due to social networking?) or is this just a failure to adjust to our new reality. We had lots of time to be social in our teens and twenties, perhaps this loneliness is just an attempt to hang on to our youth by hanging onto that lifestyle.

While I know that at least part of my loneliness comes from mismanaged expectations I think more of my issues stem from the fact that I’ve had too much time on my hands, or at least the things I’m filling my time with aren’t hard enough to fully engage my focus. I also have too many options. So time+options leads me to spend time ruminating on whether I’m having *enough* fun. I have trouble enjoying what I’m doing, because I’m always wondering if this is the *best* thing I could be doing right now.

One of the things I started focusing on last year was mindfulness. I’ve been reading several of the works of Thich Nhat Hanh. He posits a similar idea, that we’ve actually become too busy, and that by trying to do too many things in too short a time we end up enjoying none of them and feeling worse then when we started. The first book of his I read was Happiness: Essential Mindfulness Practices. I knew it was going to be a good fit for me when I read this passage.

“We often become so busy that we forget what we’re doing or who we are. I know many people who say they even forget to breath. We forget to look at the people we love and to appreciate them until they’re gone. Even when we have some leisure time, we don’t know how to get in touch with what is going on inside us.”

I hadn’t realized that I was busy, because I never felt like I accomplished anything, so how could I be busy – I wasn’t *doing* anything. But this passage helped me to frame what I was feeling. Basically I was so busy worrying about all the other things I wasn’t doing that I never enjoyed what I was doing.

I haven’t had much success in doing less, but I have found that when I force myself into mindful thought patterns I immediately feel calmer, more focused, and overall happier.  I’ve even been finding that it helps when I’m trying to make new friends. (See, I bet you were wondering where I was going with this – but it all comes together in the end). When I go out with friends, or meet with my new group I’ve been taking a few minutes before hand to gather myself, and put myself into a present frame of mind. Instead of worrying about what they’re thinking, “Do they like me?”, “will they want to get together again?”, I’m thinking about what they’re saying, how pleasant it is to be sitting out having a nice conversation.

The difference it makes in what I get out of these meet-ups is amazing. Even if it’s not the most interesting conversation, or the greatest outing I find myself relaxed, engaged and recharged when I’ve approached the event mindfully* from the start. So, in short, I think that perhaps at least a little of of our loneliness is coming from failing to be present in the relationships, both big and small, that we already have and failing to be present enough to form new relationships when we do finally meet a likely match. I’m also working on a theory where we spend so much time looking at our problems trying to codify and understand them that they become more of a problem than they began with – but really that’s a totally separate topic to discuss some other time.

*Here’s my little mantra I’ve been saying to keep myself mindfully focused. “This may not be the *best* thing you could be doing right now, but it is *what* you’re doing right now so focus on where you are and what you there is to enjoy about what you’re doing”