Right or left? The Parking Lot Dilemma and Setting Goals When You Live Alone

Something remarkable just occurred.  I was leaving a parking lot and realized I had no reason to go in either direction.  Home was to the right.  Town was to the left.  It didn't matter.  I could have just turned off the car, stopped traffic, and begun to write this journal entry to myself.

In my life of transporting myself, this unique moment might be a truthful thing.  It might be a sad thing.  

It is a thing.  I have nowhere to go.  Nowhere to be.  It doesn't matter what I do.  For the first time in my life, I have no human to go home to.  No one will know when I return there, or if I ever do. 

Except Tico, my cat.  So I turned left and went to the grocery store to stock up on cat food.  Now I'm home with him.  I'm OK.  He appears to be content and full of love for me. This is my purpose at this sad passing moment of my short life.

I am now embarking on a solo mission--living by myself--at a time when, for reasons I don't understand but suspect has to do with depression, I am withdrawing from every friendship and social connection.

I don't read much any more, and I haven't streamed TV or movies in well over a year.  I still play a bit of piano, and I've been doing tennis clinics at our local club.  When I leave, I go home alone and sit on the couch by myself.

If there's anything complicated in a text message, I don't reply.  I miss people, but the idea of a Zoom call requires impossible scheduling and infinite energy...both beyond me.  (I'm still showing up for work-related meetings.  I wonder how long that will last...my work energy comes in short bursts and then vanishes for days or weeks.

I can finish certain tasks.  For instance, I repaired a screen window earlier today.  

For three months, every day I've thought "I should take my mountain bike out for a ride today."

I haven't gone once.  I doubt I will before snow flies. (I cross-country skied 8 times last winter, so the snow won't save me.)

My favorite food is miso ramen, with lots of veggies and dumplings and meat or fish.  Takes 10 minutes including chopping (the diced green onions go in last).  Wonderful food but even that exhausts me and I don't get an energy rush from meals like my cats.

Perhaps this is what dying of loneliness looks like?  Or learning to live by myself, protected from a world that offers little notice and even less approval.

Here's my goal...try to navigate my way back to a new dawn where I step out of bed, hug the cats, and look forward to what the day will share with me.  And, at the end of the day, as I "walk myself home," (Ram Das paraphrase there), I am filled with self-love, self-admiration, a sense of good fortune, and gratitude beyond words.

That's a long journey and my paths are neither used nor marked.  But I have a lot of cat food in storage...so I've got that covered.  Maybe tomorrow two sources of wellbeing and self-acknowledgement.  

I'm writing this.  I could be worse...