Keeping Good Company

Sometimes it scares me how self-sufficient I am.

Not in the practical sense. I don’t mean I can change a tyre or survive for six months in the wilderness with a penknife and a packet of lentils.

I mean internally.

I can spend hours alone and barely notice that I’m alone.

Give me a question about human behaviour, identity, psychology, transition, relationships, belonging and I’m gone.

One thought opens another. One article leads to a paper, which leads to a book, which sends me off looking for an interview with the author, which reminds me of something someone said three months ago, which connects to something I wrote last year, which makes me scribble something in a notebook, which sends me searching for a completely different idea.

Hours can disappear like this and I’m completely and utterly content.

From the outside it looks like nothing’s happening, but my internal world is bustling.

There are questions flying around. Connections being made. Old assumptions being moved around. Ideas bumping into one another. Memories resurfacing. Patterns appearing. Entire internal conversations taking place.

My inner world isn’t somewhere I go when the outer world isn’t available, it’s somewhere I genuinely live.

There’s an entire landscape inside me that’s constantly generating its own material.

I never seem to reach the edge of it.

There’s always another thought to follow. Another question hiding underneath the last question. Another memory that looks different when I hold it next to something I’ve just discovered. Another connection between two things I’d assumed were unrelated.

My own mind can entertain me for hours.

But I think people like us can be misunderstood.

People who can sit alone with a book, an idea, a garden, a piece of music, a project, a question, a notebook, a half-formed thought and feel completely occupied.

People whose lives might look very small from the outside but feel enormous from within.

We tend to talk about a full life in very external terms.

How many people we see. How often we go out. Where we travel. What we experience. How busy our calendar is. How much is happening.

A life that photographs well tends to look full.

But fullness doesn’t always look like that. Some of us have extraordinarily full interior lives.

We imagine. Observe. Question. Analyse. Remember. Invent. Notice. Research. Daydream. Make connections. Replay conversations. Follow thoughts to see where they go.

There may be very little happening around us and an extraordinary amount happening within.

A life can be densely populated without having very many people in the room.

To other people, we can appear lonely or isolated. But we know that being alone and being lonely are entirely different experiences.

Some of us really can keep ourselves in extraordinarily good company.

Maybe some of the best company we know.

Which brings me back to the thought that started all of this:

Sometimes it scares me how self-sufficient I am.

Because every now and then I notice just how little I seem to need from the outside world.

I can spend an entire afternoon fascinated by human behaviour while barely interacting with another human being.

There’s something almost absurd about that when I stop to consider it.

My fascination with people can, quite literally, take me away from people.

I wonder at what point observing life begins to replace participating in it.

I wonder whether the thing that nourishes me can also swallow me whole.

Whether the lines between being absorbed and being absent blur, and whether we always know when we’ve crossed them.

I don’t know.

This is just one of today’s questions swirling around my mind.

And in about 5 minutes there will be another one I want to explore. Another connection. Another idea. Another rabbit hole. Another door opening onto something I didn’t know was there.

I don’t think I’ll ever reach the edge of my own curiosity, and maybe that’s what scares me sometimes.

Not that my inner world is empty - that it’s so full.

So rich and absorbing and endlessly capable of holding my attention that every now and then I surface, look around and remember:

Oh yes. There’s a whole world out there too.